D 



in fi:^ 



i 1 11.^^ 



1. ^,„/' i^^.^ 



vv/-\i\ 



R.I CHARD \VI LSON B.OYNTON 







Coipglit)^'^. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOHIli 



The Vital Issues of the War 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF 
THE WAR 



BY 
RICHARD WILSON BOYNTON 



BOSTON 

THE BEACON PRESS 

19 18 



-^5 






'^io'h 



Copyright, 1918, by 
RICHARD WILSON BOYNTON 



C1.A508020 • 

NOV -2 1918 



THIS VOLUME 

IS 

DEDICATED 

WITH PROFOUND RESPECT 

AND ADMIRATION 

TO 

WOODROW WILSON 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 
OF AMERICA 



He is the true history of the American People in his time. 
Step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, 
quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this 
continent; an entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse 
of one hundred millions throbbing in his heart, the^thought of their 
minds articulated by his tongue. — Adapted from Emerson's Tribute 
to Lincoln. 



PREFACE 



The first seven sermons in this volume were 
preached on successive Sundays in April and May 
and the eighth in September of the present year. 

Now that the church seems, in the eyes of many, 
to have fallen from the high esteem in which it 
was held by a former generation, no doubt a volume 
of sermons, even on "The Vital Issues of the War,*' 
runs grave risk of not being read. Since the war 
began, however, sharp criticism has been visited 
upon the pulpit for evading the discussion of its 
compelling moral and spiritual problems; it needs, 
therefore, to be made known that all pulpits, to 
say the least, have not deserved the reproach of 
failing to utilize this unique opportunity. So my 
book goes forth, quite without apology, for what 
it is — the messages of a preacher to his people in 
the regular course of his ministry, printed as they 
were delivered, with only the slight revision de- 
sirable for publication. 

Such utterances inevitably reflect a point of view 
determined in part by the time at which they were 
spoken. In this they are in nowise exceptional. 
Magazine articles, or the chapters of a book, must 
be finished sometime, and must bear internal evi- 
dences of their date of composition. Later impres- 
sions, especially of the swiftly-moving panorama 
of a world-war, would modify certain details. Thus, 
one could not speak now with as much optimism of 
the Bolshevik rule in Russia as was possible when 
Sermon IV was preached last April. Still, I have 
decided to let the sermon stand, as perhaps an 
over-sympathetic interpretation of the obscure 
strivings of the Russian democracy, the final out- 
come of which is still far from apparent. In such 
a case, one would rather err by undue generosity 
than by cold-blooded cynicism, which the sermon 
was intended to rebuke. 

vii 



With reference to conditions here at home, one's 
attitude naturally becomes more critical. In writ- 
ing Sermon VI, I found it impossible to sustain the 
tone of unqualified eulogy of American democracy 
typical of so many of its contemporary prophets. 
The seamy side of our experiment forced itself per- 
sistently upon my thoughts. Nothing could be more 
pertinent to our needful preparation for the ap- 
palling task of fitting democracy to world-organiza- 
tion than the resolute facing of our own internal 
difficulties and dangers, if indeed they are real and 
not imaginary. Let this imply no disloyalty to the 
true spirit of American democracy; quite the con- 
trary! My estimate of the quality of our men in 
public life is perhaps too low, but I retract nothing 
of the call to a searching national self-examina- 
tion. Special attention may be called to the con- 
ception of a United States of Europe, outlined in 
the closing sermon — a conception which seems 
destined to come more and more to the front, as the 
practically insuperable difficulty of constituting a 
stable Europe on the basis of present national am- 
bitions, with their unavoidable conflicts, becomes 
clear. 

I have hesitated long before adding even this 
modest volume to the ever-mounting flood of war- 
books. Yet nowhere have I, at least, come upon 
any that tries to do what this proposes — to define 
and clarify the leading issues for busy people, who 
in their casual reading catch only fragments of the 
full truth regarding the world-situation and our 
national purpose as a growing factor in it. I may 
be allowed to hope that open-minded readers will 
find here suggestions impelling them to further 
thought and study regarding these great matters, 
which must so powerfully affect our common future. 

RICHARD WILSON BOYNTON. 

Study of the First Unitarian Church, 
Buffalo, New York, September 24, 1918. 



Vlll 



CONTENTS 



Page 
Preface ------------- vii 

Sermon I 
Germany's Will to World Power ----- 3 



Sermon II 

The Gospel of Militarism - - - - - - - . 21 

Sermon III 

The Gospel of Pacifism --------37 

Sermon IV 

The War and the Social Revolution - - - - 53 

Sermon Y 
The Influence of Sea Power in the War - - - 71 

Sermon VI 

• Making the World Safe for Democracy - - - 87 

Sermon VII * 

* America's Leadership in the World of 

Tomorrow ----------- 103 

Sermon VIII 
/ The United States of Europe ------ 119 



Grateful acknowledgment for permission to reprint copyrighted 
material in made as follows: To Mr. Rudyard Kipling for the 
"Recessional," from "The Five Nations," published by Charles 
Scribner's Sons of New York. To Mr. Philip Becker Goetz and* 
The New York Times Company for "To a Fallen Foe." To the 
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, publishers of "The Poems 
and Dramas of William Vaughn Moody," for the stanzas from 
"Gloucester Moors." To Mr. Alfred Noyes and The Frederick A. 
Stokes Company, New York, for "The Search-lights." 



The Vital Issues of the War 



SERMON I 

GERMANY'S WILL TO 
WORLD POWER 



Not hy might nor by power, hut by my Spirit, 
saith the Lord of Hosts. — Zeohaeiah iv. 6. 



I here begin a series of seven ^sermons on the 
Vital Issues of the War. I do so at this time 
when the greatest, and perhaps the final, decisive 
campaign in four years' agony of slaughter is 
going forward because, while there is the utmost 
urgency of need for putting forth every ounce of 
national energy in despatching the largest possible 
number of men and ships and airplanes, and the 
greatest possible amount of food, to France in this 
hour of unparalleled crisis, there is equal and 
quite as urgent need for clear and true thinking 
and heroic, unbending resolution here at home. 
The nation must stand as a unit back of the men 
who are over there on the battle front, behind the 
guns. Only so can we strive and endure success- 
fully, so as to ensure the victory that is bound 
to be ours if we do not flinch. Grod helping us — 
no petty tribal God, but the infinite G-od of eternal 
justice and right — ^w^e cannot do otherwise than 
push on and see this thing through to the end. 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

As President Wilson declared yesterday at Balti- 
more : 

"Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, 
shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the 
affairs of men, whether right, as America conceives it, or 
dominion, as she conceives it, shall determine the destinies 
of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response pos- 
sible from us: Force, force to the utmost, force without 
stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which 
shall make right the law of the world, and cast every selfish 
dominion d'own in the dust." 

Every higher ideal that has gladdened and 
glorified the long struggle of man npward, to tame 
the beast in himself and ^'let the ape and tiger 
die, ' ' is now at stake.- It is not for us who are here 
to fight, but we can be, and should be, more than 
mere passive watchers in this conflict. It is at 
heart a spiritual warfare, a clash of world-ideals. 
Nothing more far-reaching and fundamental has 
happened in the world's experience, since the be- 
ginning of human history. If our opponents pre- 
vail, it will be one kind of a world in which we and 
all humanity will henceforth have to live. If we 
and our associates prevail, it will be another. 
That is the great and unes capable issue around 
which all the minor issues group themselves. I 
shall define these, beginning with our opponents 
and ending with ourselves. Let me urge each one 
of you to resolve in fairness to hear me through to 
the end. No single sermon of the series can ex- 
press my whole thought. It will appear in its 
completeness only when the series is done. If any 
have come here expecting to hear from me a bitter 
and unqualified, and especially an unfair, denun- 
ciation of Germany, they are bound to be disap- 



GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER 

pointed. Nothing would be easier than that. The 
temptation to indulge in it, to relieve your minds 
and mine, is great ; but I shall resist it. Not for 
an instant do I forget that some of you before me 
have your own flesh and blood, dearer far than 
your own life, at the fighting front, or preparing 
soon to go across. Let it be understood that I do 
not in any degree constitute myself an advocate 
of the German policies and ideals that I mean, 
with as much fairness as I can at such a time, to 
describe. 

There is no more senseless folly, in such an issue 
as this, than to underrate your opponent. We 
have against us a great people, very great in some 
ways, though not in all. The Germans are strong 
in ways where we are weak. In the end, they must 
learn from us ; they must be forced to learn, since 
they will have it that way. But we can, and should, 
learn from them — if not as they are, at least as 
they have been. An impartial writer — no friend 
of Germany — has said, ^^ There are elements of 
great vigor and great virtue in the German habit 
of mind; all the world could learn much from 
them.'' The same writer asserts, and it is true, 
that this war possesses, for the immense majority 
of the German people, something of the nature of 
a crusade. It has a kind of religious fervor back 
of it. Though their main reliance is on military 
'force, they could not, with three lesser allies, have 
stood off the rest of the world, and achieved the 
marvels of strength and persistence which they 
have achieved through all these months, without 
something more than that behind. What is it that 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

drives those tliousands of strong young G-erman 
men in successive waves against the deadly artil- 
lery fire from the Allied lines! Let us try today 
to do (Something like justice in our own minds to 
the German point of view. 

I can make this request of you, because since my 
return from my summer vacation in September, 
1914, the voice of this pulpit has been clear and 
unequivocal, especially since the sinking of the 
Lusitania, in May, 1915. None of you who have 
heard me regularly can question that my whole 
heart and soul and strength have been in the cause 
of freedom and democracy. I ask you to bear that 
in mind today. There is not a drop of pro-German 
blood in my veins, though I like and respect 
some who have those sympathies which are 
alien to my o^m. I shall give you but half of my 
thought in depicting Germany's will to world 
power, though I shall not fail to utter my moral 
judgment at the end. But the graver indictment 
must be postponed until next week, when the Ger- 
man gospel of militarism will be our subject. 

I do not forget that this is, or aspires to be, a 
Christian pulpit, in the broader and higher sense 
of that much-abused term. I preach here no gos- 
pel of hate. I do not ask you to love your enemies ; 
not just yet — ^not until defeat has done something 
to make them more lovable. But I do ask you to 
try, with me, to see what they are aiming to do.' 
Hate and contempt, when they come into our 
hearts, are too closely allied to secret and un- 
avowed fear. Let us be brave enough to see Ger- 
many as she actually is. Out of this fuller compre- 



GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER 

hension should spring the resolution that she shall 
be different — ^that we will help to make her differ- 
ent than she is — before we are done with her. We 
are different, are we not, from what we were in 
June, 1914'? That difference is largely of Ger- 
many's doing. It came home to me afresh last 
night when I isaw the new 74th Regiment of the 
New York State Guard, recruited for home defense, 
on parade to receive a stand of colors in their 
armory. What started all those feet to marching 
in unison? What put all those peaceable citizens 
into uniforms ? It was Germany, was it not, in the 
last analysis 1 It helps to show at least with what 
astounding might she has shaken the earth. Our 
appeal is to a might greater than hers — ^to the 
might of an aroused human and divine spirit. Not 
by might, nor by power, shall ye prevail, but by 
my spirit, said the Lord of Hosts, by the mouth 
of one of his prophets, to a prince of ancient Is- 
rael. By that sign we propose to conquer. But 
first let us look squarely at the embattled powers 
that strive against us. 

The phrase ^'will to power'' is taken from the 
writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. I am one of 
those who think that, while the influence of this 
gifted writer may have been one ingredient in 
the state of mind with which Germany went into 
this conflict, still he is in no way responsible for 
the conflict itself. Those who think otherwise, in 
my opinion, know little of Germany, and less of 
Nietzsche. There is nothing purely Nietzschean 
or German about the will to power. Every great 
people has had it and in some sense must have it. 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

Britain's far-flung empire is built on it, and it is 
what makes her cling tenaciously to her historic 
dominion over the seven seas, so essential to her 
national existence. We ourselves have it, as the 
whole world has clearly seen since the utterance 
of the Monroe Doctrine, in 1823, and especially 
since the unlooked-for results that followed our 
late miniature war with Spain. President Roose- 
velt displayed it in one of its less admirable forms 
when, according to his own statement, he ''took'' 
the Panama Canal Zone from the tiny republic of 
Colombia, and the nation as a whole approved. 
No one thought of quoting Nietzsche to justify 
that act. Nations cannot live and hold together 
without some will to power. Not, then, the will 
to power, but the kind of will and the kind of 
power that are involved, is what comes in question. 

To make clear Germany's will to world power, 
let us look at her position in Europe in contrast 
with our own on this North American continent. 
She has some sixty-five million people, we have 
one hundred million. Counting only the white race, 
our whole population exceeds hers only by some 
twenty per cent. Yet our area has from ten to 
fifteen times the extent of hers. She endeavors 
to maintain that vast population in a territory, 
not over-fertile, about the size of the State of 
Texas or the province of Ontario. One hundred 
years ago her people were mostly agricultural and 
so self-sustaining. But since the middle of the 
nineteenth century Germany has undergone the 
same industrial revolution that Great Britain 
underwent half a century earlier. She has become 



GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER 

the second manufacturing and the second export- 
ing state in the world. We think we have done 
wonders in this country, but in many respects 
Germany has outstripped us. 

Her people are not equally great in all direc- 
tions. In theoretical and applied science, in in- 
dustry and technology, in medicine, in historical 
and learned research, in many aspects of educa- 
tion, and in the general literacy of her entire pop- 
ulation, that is, the almost complete absence of 
illiteracy, Germany leads the world. We recog- 
nized all this as true before the war began — there 
is no just ground for denying it now. But, as re- 
gards international morality, they have shown 
themselves to be the most backward of all great 
peoples. Politically, and in the application of the 
democratic spirit to government, they have hardly 
emerged from ithe Middle Ages. Yet their city 
administration makes us blush for ours, and our 
lynchings make us seem to them little better than 
savages. It is almost inconceivable that such a 
defiance of public law as occurs periodically in our 
southern states could occur in their well-ordered 
and well- disciplined population. We may be very 
sure that the German people, who do not know 
what we know of the atrocities in Belgium, or do 
not believe what we believe about them, will be 
fully informed of the act of mob violence in Il- 
linois this past week when a German enemy alien, 
who protested his peaceable intentions, was taken 
from the public authorities and hanged without 
having a chance to defend himself. An act like 
that is surely no credit to our Americanism. 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

Let us consider Germany's situation in another 
aspect. Except for our northern boundary run- 
ning west from Lake Superior, and the western 
part of our Mexican border, the United States 
possesses the finest natural frontiers of any na- 
tion in the world. With the Atlantic Ocean on one 
side of us, and the Pacific on the other, and with 
our nearly unlimited possibilities of self-support, 
we are practically impregnable to outside attack. 
Those who fear an invasion by Japan ought for 
this reason, if for no other, to be ashamed to be 
knoAvn as Americans. Then we have on the north 
the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence river, and 
to the south the Gulf of Mexico and the Eio 
Grande. By contrast, Germany has no natural 
frontiers, except the Baltic Sea, and a short 
stretch of the Atlantic. Otherwise she lies open to 
attack on every side. Moreover, while no nation 
on the western hemisphere comes anywhere near 
our size and strength, Britain and Russia among 
her immediate neighbors are potentially stronger 
than she is. France, Italy and the Balkan States, 
if once they were united, are nearly as strong. 
Germany's exposure to danger is thus real, not 
theoretical. 

Century after century she has been torn by for- 
eign invaders. The fearful harrowing to which 
her people were subjected under Napoleon only a 
little over a hundred years ago, may explain, 
though it does not excuse, her ^^f rightfulness" 
now. It also accounts for, if it does not wholly 
jusftify, her dominant militarism. She has long 
been afraid of the rest of Europe, and the rest of 

10 



GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER 

Europe has been equally afraid of lier. This was 
the reason for the mad race in armament during 
the forty years of so-called armed peace. Nor 
was the fear on both sides merely imaginary. The 
deepest foundations of this world- war were laid in 
that deplorable mutual distrust. If some timid 
Americans fear what Japan might do to us, ^ve 
thousand miles away and about half as big as 
we are in her resources, what would be their state 
of mind if we lived with five or six Japans, some 
of them stronger than ourselves, as close as Can- 
ada or Mexico? One is doubtful if even a sana- 
torium could hold them. After all, the average 
German is human, even if those who control him 
have shown themselves to be inhuman. They had 
some reas'on to be afraid and to arm themselves, 
though they terribly overdid both. 

The world in which we live is a world of many 
different levels, of high and low civilization and 
of barbarism. A few peoples, through a superior 
endowment and energy, have risen far above the 
rest and have come, for the better ordering of the 
world-life, to exercise the will to power over them. 
Thus some sixty millions of the British race dom- 
inate some four hundred millions of ^ inferior'' 
peoples in Africa and India. Thus we ourselves 
control the destiny of our Negroes, Indians and 
Filipinos, and insist on keeping a predominant in- 
fluence over the entire South American continent. 
The base of every such world-empire rests on phy- 
sical force, and most of it has had to be cemented 
in human blood. Each leading and powerful race 
is gifted with a sublime faith in its own mode of 

11 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

life, and regards itself as called upon to civilize 
the backward races by inoculating tliem witli its 
own special Kultur. Eadi in a way regards itself 
as a chosen people. It believes that the greatest 
favor it can confer upon the backward races is to 
mould them after its own pattern. That word 
Kultur, which since the war broke out has been 
given a sinister meaning for those who do not 
understand German, means to the Germans them- 
selves essentially what we mean when we talk 
about Americanism — what we are trying to give 
to our immigrants, and to our dependent races 
like the Negroes and Filipinos. We can think of 
nothing better than to make them over into 
Americans. I do not say that our Kultur is not 
in some respects finer than theirs — Heaven save 
the mark! — but theirs we need to remember has 
also its noble and valuable aspects and is not 
merely what this war has shown of its seamy side. 
There are 'some things even in this blessed 
America which we may hope 'that our Filipino 
wards will not try to imitate! Germany is as 
proud of her Kultur and as loyal to it as we are 
to ours; probably more so. She is quite as anxioas 
to extend it world-wide, as we to spread ours. 

We have been a united nation since 1783, Ger- 
many only since 1871. Problems within her own 
borders occupied her statesmen until about 1890, 
as our domestic concerns sufficed for us until 
about 1898. Then she awakened suddenly to the 
world situation which has so rapidly developed 
since. Two primary needs of every modern 
progressive people had to be met — first, her 

12 



GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER 

crowded populaition, increasing at the rate of over 
800,000 annually with practically no emigration, 
had to be fed; and second, she had to find mar- 
kets, mostly foreign, for her manufactured goods. 
She then stood at the parting of the ways. If she 
had but known, these are processes requiring 
peace. Not to have realized that was her deeply 
tragic error. The lands from which she was fed, 
and the richest customers for her teeming wares, 
were precisely the great civilized powers, her 
world-neighbors, like ourselves, Argentina, Bra- 
zil, Russia, Britain and France. But she, and 
especially Prussia, her leading state, had a deep- 
rooted and on the whole temptingly successful 
military tradition, which had been fatally quick- 
ened by the career of Bismarck, and especially by 
his crushing victory over France in 1870-71. Also, 
it had become the fashion for the sitrong European 
states to plant colonies in outlying portions of the 
globe for increase of trade and extension of their 
special type of Kultur. Far in the lead was the 
British Empire, with France next and other world 
powers — even ourselves — following. Few avail- 
able spots in the sun were left, and these not of 
the best. Germany, distanced in the race by her 
late entrance into the group of world powers, 
seized what she could — vast tropical domains in 
Africa, of little immediate promise, and certain 
islands in the Pacific. 

Standing between the nations of the highest and 
those of the lowest civilization, there are more- 
over in many parts of the world, semi-civilized 
peoples, in hereditary possession of great and rich 

13 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

territories, which the superior races think they 
have the rigM, and even the mission, to aid in 
developing. We ourselves take this attitude to- 
ward Mexico. Our mining and mechanical engi- 
neers, our railroad builders and business organ- 
izers, go into Mexico to develop the country and 
incidentally to exploit it for the profit of our in- 
vestors. For centuries Britain has done this in 
India and more recently in South Africa. It has 
led her into a long succession of bloody and only 
in part justifiable wars, the latest of these the war 
with the Boers. France has done it in Algiers and 
Morocco, Madagascar and Indo-China. Naturally 
Germany wanted to try her hand. This kind of 
exploitation offers the romance of international 
trade. It returns the largest dividends and min- 
isters most to pride of ownership, and in this Ger- 
many up to 1914 was but following the procession. 
Now I want to ask you to prepare your minds 
to be generous, in spite of the almost insurmount- 
able prejudice — and I grant it to be a legitimate 
prejudice — ^that Germany's conduct in the war has 
generated in all of us. Let us for a moment try 
to forget the last four years. I want to persuade 
you to admit that Germany, up to the summer of 
four years ago, deserved to have her place in the 
sun, that she had earned it, and was amply worthy 
of it. Bear with me a little if you find this too 
hard to admit, after all that has happened. I at 
least shall contend that before the war she had an 
equal right, in this reg'ard, with other nations of 
her strength and standing, an equal right to be a 
world-power, with England, France, Russia and 

14 



GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER 

ourselves. Not to be Deutschland ueber AMes, — 
words like those, like ''Britannia rules the waves," 
like our spread-eagle, Fourth of July declama- 
tions, represent only national egotism and boast- 
fulness. We ought not to give them undue weight. 
Germany is more boastful than we, because her 
expansion in prosperity came quickly and some- 
what as a surprise. She is the nouveau riche 
among the nations, while Britain has held posses- 
sion so long, she has had the enjoyment of her 
immense wealth for so many generations, that she 
has found boastfulness to be not quite good form. 
The Germans, and perhaps we, may learn it some 
day. 

Now where was Germany to turn, with her 
mounting capital and her abounding ability and 
enterprise, for a region among the half-developed 
parts of the earth where she might send her sons 
and spread her type of civilization? Millions of 
her children had emigrated to the United States 
and had given to this nation some of the best blood 
it contains; but they were in process of being 
subjected to our American and Anglo-Saxon 
Kultur. No doubt Germany has done much, both 
openly and secretly, to hold these German- 
Americans loyal to herself ; but in spite of all we 
know of the attitude of a fraction among them, the 
result of her efforts has not been brilliant, and 
could not in the nature of things be lasting. In 
the end, as the loyalty of the younger generation 
shows with singularly few exceptions, the Ameri- 
can spirit is bound to win them. Of that we may 
now rest assured. Other thousands of Germans 

IS 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

had gone to soutlTern Brazil, Where they still form 
a compact mass, in language and KuUur more 
homogeneous than anywhere among us. But Ger- 
many cannot unite them to herself as a subject 
state, because of our will to power as expressed in 
the Monroe Doctrine. We have expressly for- 
bidden that. We have ^liitenVerhoten over the 
whole continent to the south of us ; and Germany 
well understands what that means, when it is 
backed by force. Rather than permit her expan- 
sion there, we have always been ready to fight. 
Only a single promising direction was left, and 
Germany took that. It led to her famous Drang 
nach Osten, her push toward the east. '^West- 
ward the course of empire takes its way," had 
sung the good Bishop Berkeley in the eighteenth 
century. But in the nineteenth century, Euro^Dean 
imperialism took its way in the opposite direction, 
toward the east. 

Southeastward from Germany and her sister 
empire of Austria, across the Balkans and beyond 
the famous straits over which the apostle Paul 
brought his new religion to Europe, lay the his- 
toric lands of Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia 
— ^once the garden spot of the world, with a won- 
derful geniality of climate, and full of unbounded 
possibilities of revival under the magic touch of 
modern enterpriae. Lying practically neglected 
between the empires of Russia and Britain, these 
countries seemed the predestined spot on th'e globe . 
for Germany's commercial expansion and exploit- 
ation. This was the renowned Pan-German 
scheme, on which M. Cheradame has expended so 

16 



GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER 

much fervid eloquence — all of it intensely hostile, 
and much of it, in my opinion, grossly misleading 
— in the Atlantic Monthly. I hold that it was, 
and is, absolutely legitimate . for German capital 
and enterprise to undertake the peaceable develop- 
ment of these neg-lected lands. Why should there 
not be Pan-Germans as there were Pan-Angles, 
Pan- Americans, Pan-Slavs and Pan- Japanese f I 
can conceive of no earthly reason why there should 
not be, as the world was before the war broke 
out. That, of course, has changed everything. 
After Germany ^s defeat we shall possibly see a 
change back again, and it may be that something 
of this great scheme on commercial, not on militar- 
istic, lines will yet be worked out. 

You are perhaps growing a little impatient with 
me for these recurring comparisons in which Ger- 
many who, since July, 1914, has increasingly made 
herself the moral pariah among nations, is shown 
to be only tarred a little more deeply than the 
rest of us with the same brush of aggressive im- 
perialism. It is true that a world-wide difference 
is made by what has happened in the last four 
years. It demonstrates that the rest of us are 
disposed to be fair, and Germany is not. The 
tendency of British and American imperialism is 
to lift and free the subject peoples, of which the 
most outstanding miracle was Britain's treatment 
of the Boers, and our own treatment of the Fili- 
pinos ; while the tendency of German expansion is 
to a brutal enslavement of lesser races and the 
binding of them to her car of conquest. The events 
of the last four years have only too painfully 

17 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

shown that Prussian autocracy and militarism had 
become dangerous, with its spying and undermin- 
ing, its jealousy and rutlilessness, to the safety 
and peace of the world. Ay, there's the rub! 
Now we are coming to the real point. You will 
see that it concerns my next week's subject, the 
gospel of militarism. That is the other half of 
the case, that I could only begin to present today, 
as I amply warned you. Two parties have divided 
Germany between them, the commercialists and 
the militarists, and suddenly after long prepara- 
tion the militarists leaped into the saddle in the 
summer of 1914, and took the lead that brought 
about Germany's impending ruin. 

Let me sum up. The outcome of my thought 
thus far is this : Germany, as one of the four or 
five most progressive peoples of the world, had 
until war broke upon us the same right to her will 
to world power as the rest of the great leading 
nations. Humanity needed, and it will always 
need, her ability, her energy, her science and her 
enterprise. So long as she kept to the ways of 
peace, she was honored, respected, admired and 
imitated. Moreover, she was prosperous, more 
swiftly than any people had ever been. She has 
been insisting on her right to freedom of the seas 
— ^but the seas were open to her legitimate errands. 
'^Made in Germany" was the mark to be observed 
on thousands of articles in commonest use. The 
pioneers of her commerce were in every market. 
Eager students of her Kultur flocked to her uni- 
versities from the four corners of the globe. All 
that she threw away for the deceptive shimmer of 

18 



GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER 

military glory. ^^0 what a fall was there, my 
countrymen ! ' ' 

She fell, the day the German legions crossed the 
Belgian frontier, as Satan fell headlong from 
heaven into the deepest pit. Plato tells us that the 
best, when it is corrupted, turns to the worst. The 
crimes of militant Germany shout to the skies. 
Her good name is branded by some of them for 
all future time. And why? Because she followed 
false guides, because she worshipped a tribal God, 
because she turned her back. on conscience, because 
she gave her soul for a mess of pottage, because 
''not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit'' 
do nations grow and flourish, now as of old. She 
that was so great has been cast down, and no one 
can say how or when she will regain the place that 
she so recklessly and so desperately forfeited. 

Twenty-one years ago, at the Diamond Jubilee 
of Queen Victoria, a thing happened which we now 
see is the only thing that will remain forever in 
memory of all that pomp and ceremony, — the pub- 
lication of Kipling's "Recessional," that great 
hymn of warning and contrition in which the laur- 
eate of British Imperialism solemnly recalled his 
countrymen to the thought of the moral and spir- 
itual foundations of enduring earthly power. Ger- 
many as yet has found no poet, no prophet, no 
philosopher, no statesman — unless we except Karl 
Liebknecht in his prison or the recently published 
revelations of Prince Lichnowsky, her ambassador 
in London at the outbreak of the war — to bring to 
her a similar admonition. That is why she has 
fallen as she has. That is the message from the 

19 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

Lord of Hosts which she most needs to hear, and 
must hear before she can be forgiven and restored 
to the respect of mankind. 

God of our fathers, known of old, 

Lord of our far-flung battle line, 
Beneath whose awful hand we hold 

Dominion over palm and pine — 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget — lest we forget! 

The tumult and the shouting dies; 

The captains and the kings depart; • 

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice. 

An humble and a contrite heart. 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet. 
Lest we forget — le.st we forget! 

Far-called, our navies melt away; 

On dune and headland sinks the fire: 
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! 
Judge of the nations, spare us yet, 
Lest we forget — lest we forget! 

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose 
Wild tongues that have not thee in awe. 

Such boastings as the Gentiles use, 

Or lesser breeds without the Law — 

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 

Lest we forget — lest we forget! 

For heathen heart that puts her trust 

In reeking tube and iron shard. 
All valiant dust that builds on dust. 

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, 
For frantic boast and foolish word — 
Thy mercy on Thy people. Lord! 



20 



SERMON II 
THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM 



Whether one member suffer^ all the members 
suffer with it: or one member is honored^ all the 
members rejoice with it. — I Coeinthians xii. 26. 



No such awful situation as that into which the 
world has been plunged for the last four years 
could ever have arisen without the long working 
of deep-seated causes that only now are being 
revealed in their appropriate effects. The most 
visibly evident of these causes is the world-disease 
to which we give the name of militarism. I shall 
try, in this second sermon, to trace that dread 
visitation back to its origins, to define its true 
character, and finally to ask if there can be any 
possible remedy for it, — anything that will save 
future generations from the incalculable harm 
which it has done to this one. It is easy now for 
us to see that the nations, as members of the one 
body that we call humanity, can only stand or fall 
together; that no one of them can suffer without 
all the others suffering likewise. We are so closely 
bound together that it must be so. The situation 
in which we find ourselves is only one more illus- 
tration of the enduring truth of our text: 
*^ Whether one member suffer, all the members 

21 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

suffer with it.'' One cannot be hurt or healed 
without all being made to suffer or rejoice at the 
same time. 

"What do we mean by militarism? Can it be so 
described that we can easily discriminate it from 
that totally different thing which externally can 
hardly be distinguished from it — that compara- 
tively harmless arming of themselves by nations 
for self-defense that superficially looks to be the 
same? We have to recognize that in certain cases, 
between things that are fundamentally alike, dif- 
ferences in degree may become so great as to 
amount to differences in kind. Thus charcoal and 
diamonds are both forms of one basic substance 
— carbon, variously organized and compressed. 
The familiar drug, nux vomica, when used in mild 
dilution makes an excellent tonic, but when con- 
centrated is a deadly poison. The cow-pox, spread 
by means of vaccination, is in nearly all cases a 
harmless substitute for the far more virulent 
small-pox which, when it was allowed in former 
times to run unchecked, used to ravage whole com- 
munities, with serious results. The best definition 
of militarism that I am able to frame is that it is 
an extreme and exaggerated form of the primitive 
necessity, for all human communities and individ- 
uals, of self-defense. Self-defense is the mild and 
harmless degree of that same thing of which mili- 
tarism is the extreme degree, carried by fanaticism 
to the verge, if not beyond the verge, of insanity. 
The difference in degree has come to be so great 
as to be a difference in kind. It is just as if a 
little fire should start in your house. If you con- 

22 



THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM 

trol it quickly it may do no great damage, but if 
you neglect it, or especially if you pour gasoline 
on it, then it takes a supreme effort to put it out. 
Militarism fans the flames of our natural impulse 
to self-defense, until it raises a conflagration. 

Let us clear our minds of cant! Armed force 
in some form always has existed and — short of the 
millenium — always will exist, among the societies 
of men. We meet it in every-day experience in 
one of its simpler forms in the guise of the police- 
man. The quiet officer, who walks past your home 
by day or by night, makes no parade of his weight- 
ed club or loaded revolver, but you feel a great 
deal safer as a member of the community to know 
that those weapons are at hand, for use in case of. 
need. Knowledge that they are there is often 
enough for potential evil-doers. Highwaymen or 
housebreakers will think twice before they go to 
work in a well-guarded town or city. If we have 
highwaymen or housebreakers in our community, 
it is because we are not properly protected. The 
whole system of our courts and jails for dealing 
with the criminally inclined rests on an armed 
force of policemen or soldiers in the background. 
Otherwise, any settled society would be impossible. 
It would become a prey to the violent and disor- 
derly elements that never yet have been wholly 
suppressed anywhere in the world. 

What is thus true of community relations holds 
equally true of world relations. There are dan- 
gerously disturbing factors in the life of even 
those peoples that are farthest advanced toward 
political security. Differences of race, of religion, 

23 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

of economic outlook, and above all of national as- 
piration make even the peacefully inclined nations 
subject to grave disturbances of their equilibrium. 
At the present stage of human evolution, one can 
see no way of escape from these conditions. All 
of us have not equal ability. We do not look at 
things from the spme angle. Our purposes often 
conflict. What is true of individuals is equally 
true of nations. Some are strong, others weak; 
some aggressive, others sluggish ; some ambitious 
to add to their possessions, others content with 
what they have. Especially in the world-situation, 
as it had developed by the close of the nineteenth 
and the opening of the twentieth century, trade 
competition on an international scale had been 
added lo these other disturbing factors. Here we 
see the human roots of that scourge of militarism 
which, after growing to colossal proportions 
almost under our very eyes, has ended by plunging 
mankind — to call it civilized would seem almost 
too sharp a satire — into this Armageddon of 
mutual destruction. 

The point that I am concerned to establish, be- 
yond any reasonable dispute, is that some degree 
of armed force is essential and indispensable for 
any ordered life, on the great scale of the world, 
as on the lesser scale of the single community. 
The plausible but mistaken hope that the world 
can do without any armed force will be the subject 
of next Sunday's sermon, on the Grospel of Pa- 
cifism. That is the other extreme from militarism, 
which is what concerns us now. Militarism, then, 
which has come so suddenly — thoug'h not without 

24 



THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM 

long preparation and ample warning — to bear its 
direful frnit, is to be thought of as the mad and 
fatal excess of those needful measures that have 
to be taken by the world in its sober senses for 
self-protection against the lurking foes of its 
higher civilization. We have to have some degree 
of it, but we do not have to have this extreme 
degree. A nation may always need to be able to 
defend itself from attack. No nation ever need 
be deliberately organized for purposes of ag- 
gression. 

Militarism, then, is not merely a matter of ar- 
maments, military or naval. These are its instru- 
ments, but they neither determine its nature, nor 
of themselves indicate its presence. No sane per- 
son would ever call Great Britain — though she 
possesses the greatest navy in the world, and has 
fought an unending succession of wars, small and 
great, in most parts of the globe — a militaristic 
nation. That she had immense, little developed, 
military capacity Germany, who was disposed to 
think otherwise, is now finding out to her sorrow. 
Also, one feels confident in asserting that the 
United States is no more militaristic today, not- 
withstanding the gigantic army we are creating 
and the stern task that lies just ahead of us, than 
it was a year ago when that army had not begun 
to be recruited. I cannot prove these sw^eeping 
judgments. To the convinced pacifist, who sees 
militarism wherever he sees armaments, they 
would seem utterly void of truth. But I can and 
do affirm them ; and I add without hesitation that 
any one who thinks otherwise of the British and 

25 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

American people can never hope to understand 
what they are undertaking to accomplish in this 
war. Further, any one who does so think is in- 
capable of grasping the distinction between what 
looks like militarism from the outside, as much 
as one pea looks like another pea, yet is divided 
from it by the whole diameter of right from wrong. 
The chosen exponent of militarism in its most 
hideous form is, of course, modern, imperialist 
Germany. But we shall do Germany a grave and 
gratuitous injustice — which we are not warranted 
in doing her, though she is our enemy, — if we as- 
sume that militarism has always been, or is with- 
out qualification even now, triumphant among her 
people, or monopolized by them. No, the case is 
not so simple as that. All crime is not on one 
side and all virtue on the other. It is an open 
secret, to those who know the European nation- 
alities at first-hand, that France, glorious France, 
has been for a long time almost as militaristic as 
her more powerful neighbor, Germany. The two 
peoples have acted and reacted on each other with 
constant mutual irritation. The Bonapartist tra- 
dition is far from dead yet. The French people, 
with their easily excited imagination, have always 
responded to the glamor of military glory. It was 
the inherent militarism of the French national 
character that pushed Napoleon III into his 
ghastly betrayal of the nation in 1870 ; and that at 
a later date, within our own remembrance, almost 
led them into war behind that shoddy adventurer, 
General Boulanger. Powerful influences of the 
newer time have worked against this form of na- 

26 



THE GOSPELOF MILITARISM 

tional insanity, more in France than in Germany, 
but they have never prevailed to the same extent 
as in Britain and with us. No doubt it may be 
said, in view of what happened in 1914 — for- 
tunately for poor, stricken, heroic, noble France, 
they did not prevail ! The Russia of the Czars was 
militaristic, as the Russia of the Bolshevik revo- 
lution emphatically is not. We could even wish 
it were more so. Japan is probably militaristic, 
and that is w^hy the recent landing of her troops in 
Vladivostock, even though Great Britain is said 
to have joined her in it, is a matter for some 
anxiety for those — like myself — who still have a 
confident hope of the soundness of the new Rus- 
sian democracy, over and above all appearances 
to the contrary. One feels that the New Russia 
needs time and great patience to work out her own 
fate under the heavy yoke that conquering Ger- 
many is trying to impose upon her. The German 
defeat on the western front, when it comes — and 
it may not be so long in coming — will soon check 
further progress of her tyranny in Russia. 

Militarism is a spirit, a state of mind, an atti- 
tude toward other nations and the world situation 
generally, of which Germany offers the most ex- 
aggerated instance, but in which other powerful 
and ambitious peoples share in varying degrees. 
This seems to me to be the essential distinction : — 
militarism prevails to some extent with every 
people that earnestly wants to gain something it 
has not now. Its purpose is frankly aggressive, — 
not defense, but plunder. One can even conceive 
of conditions under which the British and our- 

27 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

selves, who are relatively free from it, might be- 
come tainted with it. If a victory for Germany 
were conceivable, now that our great weight is 
being thrown into the scale against her, the worst 
result to be apprehended would be the enforced 
militarism on our part that would almost certainly 
follow. To a lasting domination by Grerman arms 
the United States would never submit — never ! To 
have such a people over us we would not endure. 
Much as they have to teach us in some ways, there 
are other things we do not care to learn from them. 
That, would mean the straining of every nerve to 
equip ourselves for the next conflict, so completely 
as to ensure Germany's downfall. Dark as the 
outlook on the surface may seem today, that can- 
not be-in store for us or for our children. 

It may be more difficult than it would have been 
four years ago to suppose any longer that the 
German mind is transparently honest. But, in 
any case, at moments it is brutally frank. If the 
innocent and unsuspecting world before the war — 
not knowing that the pit of hell was yawning so 
near us — could not be brought to credit the Ger- 
man militaristic ideals, it was not because any 
effort had been made to conceal them — quite the 
contrary. Their writers and publicists had long 
openly avowed them ; only, they were too horrible 
to be believed. Some representative books like 
those of Treitschke and Bernhardi have been put 
into English, where any one may read them. I can 
assure you from recent experience that it is an in- 
forming exercise to read these books. The only 
pity is that those whose place it was to guide the 

28 



THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM 

destinies of the western nations had not taken to 
reading them earlier. Except for Colonel Roose- 
velt and a few others, we were all of us living in 
a fooPs paradise of ignorance and complacency. 

I have come upon a reference to a German work 
on war by a certain Wagner — not, of course, the 
composer — which is said to make Bernhardi's 
writings sound effeminate. This must have been 
the text-book studied by those who despoiled Bel- 
gium and depopulated Armenia. It is stated on 
good authority that the number of books published 
in the German Empire on the subject of war alone 
in the year 1913 was some eight hundred. It had 
become an obsession. War was not looked upon 
as a rare incident, something that might come once 
in a generation, or once in a lifetime. It was some- 
thing inevitable. To prepare for it and to wage 
it was the chief of national industries ; to urge it 
was the crowning glory of German idealism. Bern- 
hardi unblushingly asserts all this and more. One 
does not see how Wagner could go any farther. 
War, says Bernhardi, is not alone a biological ne- 
cessity ; it is a moral duty. Might is the supreme 
right, because from its decisions there can be no 
earthly appeal. 

It is curious that these writers seem never to 
have considered that the decision mi^ht some day 
go against the Fatherland. Yet the fanaticism of 
Bernhardi — his blind idolatory of war under all 
conditions — would have been equal even to that. 
In one passage, he refers to the political regenera- 
tion of Prussia as having been brought about by 
her series of crushing defeats under Napoleon, 

29 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

from 1807 to 1815. War was good for Prussia 
even when she was whipped ! That is certainly 
carrying things to extreme conclusions. This 
part, however, of his otherwise dubious prophecy 
may turn out to be true. For a defeated Germany 
will be ready for political regeneration as a vic- 
torious Germany would not. When the autocracy 
and the military caste are hurled down from their 
seats of criminal power, then the long-postponed 
political revolution will be due. When at last it 
has the opportunity to rouse itself, the German 
democracy, long bound to the car of conquest and 
led to inconceivable slaughter, will begin to come 
into its own. May God speed the day! 

Now what is the philosophy of nationality on 
which this astounding structure of militarism has 
been raised in the mind and life of Germany! We 
find it cogently stated in the ^'Polities'' of Treit- 
schke. I do not want to give the impression that 
he or any of these writers was a mere monstrosity. 
My purpose is too high and serious, and I hope too 
fair and just, to permit me to fall into the method 
of caricature. I am trying to tell the truth just aS 
I see it, without bias to one side or the other. 
Whatever may be true of Bernhardi, whether or 
not he is as representative as he has been taken to 
be, Treitschke was the most brilliant of German 
historians, loyally devoted to the Prussian state- 
system, and a man who stamped his convictions 
and prejudices on the mind of Germany as not 
even Macaulay stamped his on the mind of Eng- 
land. Our country has not produced a historian 
to compare with him as an awakener of patriot- 

30 



THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM 

ism. He is not to be lightly dismissed by any one. 
Much of what he writes on politics is good, plain, 
common sense, that no one with an eye for the 
often stern realities of life would think of reject- 
ing. . Treitschke was nobody's fool, and to refute 
him you must be well armed at every point with 
solid fact and serried argument. The discussion 
of war forms only a small part of his lengthy and 
systematic treatise on Politics. He starts from 
the conception of the state as power — power to 
bind its people together, and power to protect them 
against possible enemies. This is perfectly cor- 
rect — the state is power, and in the nature of the 
case must be^until you begin to carry it out to 
one-sided consequences. Treitschke does this, and 
events have shown us what effect it has had on 
the nation he sought to exalt above all others. 

^^ Above all nations is humanity," says the great 
motto that Goldwin Smith caused to be carved on 
a stone seat on the campus of Cornell University. 
This, the representatives of G-erman militarism 
will in no wise admit. Treitschke scoifs at hu- 
manity, as a conception too vague and intangible to 
have any meaning. In this respect President Wil- 
son shows himself to possess an infinitely superior 
political judgment. Humanity is like the horizon ; 
you can deny it only by first assuming that it is 
there. It surrounds you, whoever you are and 
wherever you may go. No nation lives to itself 
alone or can so live. As a French writer has 
said, ^ ^ The right of the individual has no existence 
except in society; the right of the nation has no 
existence except within the larger humanity. 

31 



> J 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

Humanity is something more than all the people 
who happen to exist in the world at one time. It 
is an ideal sentiment, an nndying aspiration of the 
heart. It is one of those impregnable spiritual 
facts like that which lay in the background of the 
apostle Paul's mind when he wrote: ^^ Whether 
one member suffer, all the members suffer with 
it.'' The frightful delusion of militarism is its 
notion that this divine law of human solidarity can 
be abrogated by one nation, G-ermany, being able 
to subject all others to its iron will to power. The 
very stars in their course fight against such a per- 
version of the will of God for men. 

*^ Above all nations is humanity." The world is 
ideally and potentially one, and the advancement 
of civilization has always consisted in the pro- 
gressive realization of this over-arching unity. 
MilitarisTQ sins most deeply by being, in principle, 
the deadliest foe of this advance. According to its 
diabolical philosophy, the hand of every nation 
must be against the hand of every other. They are 
rivals, each working only for its own selfish in- 
terests; and when those interests clash, each is 
entitled to press its own claims to the point of 
violence. That was the meaning of Germany's 
ever-mounting passion for armaments on land and 
sea. She has talked of protecting and extending 
her Kultur. Last Sunday I fully admitted the le- 
gitimacy of this ambition, no matter how far she 
carried it by decent and civilized means. The 
world could have nothing but the most cordial wel- 
come for the best she had to offer. But, to toler- 
ate her forcing it on us by waging war — forever 

32 



THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM 

no ! It is intolerable. We have seen, and Ger- 
many must finally realize, what that must come to. 
How much has her Kultur been advantaged since 
she spoke her ultimatum to unwilling France, and 
unready Russia, and little Belgium? The harm 
she has done to her own best life by this war is not 
to be estimated. Something of what she has lost 
by it in reputation can never be recovered. It will 
take one generation, perhaps two, for her to begin 
to regain anything like the world's former respect. 
Let no one despise her enormous effort, or make 
light of the moral unity and discipline that her 
people have shown in following their Kaiser and 
his generals. The German nation, wickedly as its 
magnificent energy and skill have been misdirect- 
ed, has proved itself one of the wonders of the 
world — ^no more wonderful, indeed, than Great 
Britain and France. But the pity of it, and the 
shame of it, and the utter, woeful waste of it! 
At last militarism has overreached itself, and 
given to coming centuries a warning that can 
scarcely go unheeded. We are seeing what it can 
do, and having seen it, let us resolve to destroy it 
forever. 

One of the most flagrant vices of the ingrained 
militaristic habit of mind is the cold-blooded 
cynicism with which it judges other nations. It 
sees them only as beasts of prey ready to leap on 
one another. To read Treitschke and Bernhardi 
on the callous plottings of England, France, Italy, 
Russia, yes, and of the United States of America 
against Germany, is like living in a nightmare. 
If you want to know what a hard-headed reprobate 

33 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

the average American is, read Bernhardi. A mind 
so drugged with base suspicion loses all sense of 
proportion and probability. Prince Lichnowsky 
who, w^hen he was German ambassador in London, 
got to know the British people, has lately told the 
German nation: ^'We deliberately destroyed the 
possibility of a peaceful settlement. * * * The 
whole civilized world outside Germany attrib- 
utes to us the sole guilt for the world war. ' ' That 
will be the verdict of history. The war began in 
a state of suspicion that was not based on fact. 
It had something to go on, but not much. The 
typical militarist is a man who jumps affrighted 
at his own shadow. The bully is always a coward. 
Germany's bullying and swashbucklering is all of 
it the most damning evidence of her craven heart 
of fear. Individually, her people are brave, but 
as a nation she is a rank and arrant coward. She 
could not stand the steady strain of fair and hon- 
orable competition. She maneuvered to take ad- 
vantage of her antagonists, as she deemed them^ 
and to shoot first. The writers I have been quot- 
ing, especially Bernhardi, are forever reiterating 
that the thing for a nation to do is to choose a 
favorable time to force the fighting, for then she 
will inevitably win. Well, the General Staff picked 
their time. All omens seemed favorable. Every- 
thing was ready, to the last button. Are they go- 
ing to win? Humanity dare not allow it. Life 
would not be worth living. The earth of which 
they have made a shambles would then be a den 
of thieves and murderers. Moral right would have 
been repealed. All goodness and sweetness would 

34 



THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM 

have gone out of existence. Never, never can such 
a monstrous conspiracy succeed! They must be 
pressed back. Their Kaiser and his precious 
brood of princes must be put where they can do 
no further harm. Their autocrats and junkers 
must be shorn of their impudent domination. 
Humanity requires it. It must and shall be done. 
No matter how long it takes, no matter if every 
one of us goes into the ranks, nothing matters now 
in comparison with winning this war for ourselves 
and the Allied peoples and the future of humanity. 
And then, what next? Force, as we saw at the 
beginning, cannot for long or perhaps forever be 
banished from the world. But hencefort;h, as the 
greatest result to grow from the demonstrated 
bankruptcy of militarism, it must be a righteous, 
unified, rational, humane force. Its only reason 
for being will be the adequate policing of the 
world, to suppress disorder and to uphold order in 
every part of the wide earth. To accomplish this 
there must be a league of the free and democratic 
peoples, with Britain and the United States at its 
head — that glorious consummation of which ex- 
President Taft has made himself the prophet, 
though, not the only one, among us. Such a league 
of nations is surely coming, and when it comes 
some part of the cost of this war will be worth 
having paid. Militarism has proven to be self- 
destructive. We are witnessing its agony of sui- 
cide. It has brought us almost within sight of the 
hol}^ vision of the angels at Bethlehem — peace on 
earth and good will to men. 

35 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

I end my sermon with a sense of the indescrib- 
able tragedy of it. All those millions dead and 
maimed and bereft, — ^it strains the strongest 
reason to face the truth. And for what gain? 
Since God is, we dare not say it has been for noth- 
ing. For out of all the hate must spring a new 
and larger love. Out of supreme pity must spring 
a profounder peace. One of our own poets, a 
member of this congregation, Philip Becker Goetz, 
has written the following lines with which I close. 
They might be the words of any one on either side 
who had killed blindly, mechanically, unknowingly, 
some one on the other side whom he had never 
seen. The poem is entitled : 

TO A FALLEN FOE 

I see you lying there upon the field, 
The sunset all that flushes your young cheeks, 
The mist like groping lips your white brow seeks, 
As if to print the kiss your mother cannot yield. 

You were my foe — I should be glad you fell 
And took to death the peril of your strength; 
But somehow I grow sick at your limp length 
And wonder which of us is nearer hell. 

I stilled the music that was in your heart, 
I cheated some lass of her starry vow: 
• I'd give an empire to recall you now, 
And in a lone grave gladly act your part! 



36 



SERMON III 
THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM 



They have healed the hurt of my people lightly j 
saying^ Peace, peace; when there is no peace. 

— Jekemiah vi. 14. 



The opposite delusion to militarism is pacifism. 
Its delusion is that which the prophet describes 
in these words of the text : ^'They have healed the 
hurt of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace; 
when there is no peace." In this third sermon I 
intend to pay my respects to the pacifists — my 
respects *and also my respect. I have been a paci- 
fist myself, and to a certain extent shall always be 
one ; never an extreme pacifist, feeling that no 
price was too great to pay for peace. I never felt 
that peace was the highest possible good. But 
until August, 1914, I supposed myself to be a 
fairly consistent peace advocate. Up to that 
fateful summer most Americans, one fancies, 
had a more or less fervent hope for the near 
advent of the new internationalism, the gradual 
reduction of armaments on land and sea, the 
progress of the principle of arbitration in disputes 
between nations — in short, the Wliole group of 
world-ideals represented by the two Hague Peace 
Conferences of 1899 and 1907. 

37 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

Time, and the amazing changes that the swift 
years have wrought, have profoundly affected the 
earlier attitude of m^any of us. While there is 
need of having fixed principles of conduct, and of 
holding loyally to them, it is not well that they 
should be held so rigidly as to be incapable of 
adaptation when the circumstances have radically 
altered. Peace among the nations I favor as much 
as ever I did. Indeed, now that modern warfare 
has revealed itself as fiendish and hellish beyond 
the utmost range of former imagination, I believe 
we all shall msh for its extermination with a new 
fervency of desire. Who would not wish and pray 
for it? Yet, as the old writer of Ecclesiastes has 
it, There is a time for everything — 'a time for war 
and a time for peace. And the present, when all 
that we value in civilization has become the object 
of a most dastardly and wanton attack, appears to 
me — in spite of my former principles, if you will, 
or as I shall contend, rather because of them — a 
time for the resolute and unremitting prosecution 
of our just cause in this world-conflict, in order 
that peace when it comes may have some promise 
of permanence. 

Though all signs may fail, the long-drawn agony 
of fire and blood seems to be slowly wearing itself 
out. Unless the United States bestirs itself might- 
ily, or the evident unrest in Austria reaches the 
boiling point, it may last through another summer 
or longer. But the end is inevitably coming. The 
strain on the life and resources of even the most 
powerful nations is certain to reach a point be- 
yond endurance. There mil be either a sudden 

38 



THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM 

break or a slow dying down of the intolerable 
misery. It is, then, none too soon, for those who 
can still keep enough detachment of mind, to look 
through the battle-smoke and picture to our- 
selves the strange, new, silent earth as it must 
emerge when the incessant roar of the guns is over. 
What kind of world is it to be? It is plain to be 
seen, even now, that it will offer problems of a 
gravity 'and complexity beyond our present calcu- 
lation. Some of ithem we can, in a way, anticipate. 
Others will depend on the time when peace comes, 
and the exact form which it takes. The rest of 
this series of sermons will encourage the forward 
look, and undertake to outline a pant at least of 
the new situation that we should try to establish 
for the sake of ''just and lasting peace among our- 
selves and with all nations. ' ' To my thinking, a;t 
least, while pacifism is justly in bad repute for 
the moment, because of the ill-^advised and imprac- 
ticable action of some of its exponents, the hour 
cannot be forever delayed when — ^having given the 
war -makers their long and lurid inning — the world 
will turn with unspeakable relief to realize anew 
the blessing of the peace-makers. 

Very much as we found to be the case with the 
will to power, and even with militarism, so also- 
pacifism is not all of a piece, to be accepted or 
rejected without thoughtful discrimination. It is 
a mixed attitude. It has some aspects that are 
defensible and others that are not. In some ways, 
when pushed to extreme conclusions, it is utterly 
impracticable. But in others, and as an ideal 
principle, it is one of the sublimest visions for the 

39 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

future of the race that has ever visited the mind 
of man. I propose', first, to deal with it sympa- 
theticaJUy, to set forth its good and reasonable and 
attainahle side, so far as I am now aible ; and then 
to point out its inherent limitations, and the in- 
superable obstacles that it has to confront at the 
present stage of human development. 

I know that there are strong feelings among you 
on this, as on the other subjects of this series of 
sermons, and I can only ask that you will hear me 
patiently and considerately in view of the diffi- 
culty inherent in what I am attempting to do. 
There is one thing, at least, that may be safely 
affirmed at the outset, namely, that under no cir- 
cumstances that we are able to conceive, could the 
pacifists possibly have m^ade such an awful, un- 
speakable mess of the world-situation as the mili- 
tarists have made of it. One does not ignore the 
great gains that are already apparent. For if 
the war has resulted in fearful losses materially, 
it has brought very decided gains spiritually. But 
if we could bring back the millions of newly dead ; 
call them again in manly strength out of their 
recent graves, and restore them to their loved 
ones; and if then we could take a vote as to 
whether to go through it all again, or settle the 
differences of the peoples by conference around 
a talble — some way, any way, so they were settled 
rationally, and without all this spilling of blood — 
can any one doubt the issue of such la referendum? 
The trouble before the war was not that there 
were too many pacifists, but that there were too 
few of them, and that the apostles of violence sat 

40 



THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM 

in too many of the seats of power. If it takes two 
to make a qnarrel, it also takes two to keep the 
peace. Wlien one is bound to fight, the other must 
also fight or be exterminated. For my part, I 
choose to fight rather than to see everything I hold 
dear put in jeopardy. 

The primary weakness of pacifism is that it puts 
too high an estimate on humian nature as it is now 
constituted: So long as any nation is restless, dis- 
satisfied with its place in the worid, and cherishes 
unrealized imperialistic ambitions, the day for 
universal disarmament has not yet dawned. It is 
well to practice kindness to animals, but that does 
not mean stopping to reason with a mad dog 
when he is 'attacking your child. The peaceable 
peoples said, ^^Come, pretty pussy,'' quite long 
enough to the Prussian tiger. Since pussy came, 
and we have felt her claws in our flesh, naturally 
we have quite considerably changed our tune. 

There is an individual and instinctive, as well 
as la public and professional, pacifism. We may 
say that the guiding motive of the one is the prin- 
ciple of non-resistance to evil ; or, stated positively, 
the attempt to love our neighbor as ourself . The 
guiding motive of the other is anti-nationalism or 
anti-patriotism ; or, positively, the attempt to give 
expression to the international mind. Both of 
these motives are excellent; the only question is 
as to their present (application. The typical paci- 
fist — except in those cases, perhaps relatively rare, 
where the attitude is merely a cloak for cowardice 
— is apt to be an idealist; often, though not in- 
variably, a Christian idealist. I realize that I am 

41 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

probably speaking to some to whom all pacifism 
and all pacifists, lumped together, are simply 
anathema. They cannot away with them. Bnt no 
movement as earnest as this, that draws to itself 
so many spirits touched to finer issues, can be 
rightly judged by what Oolonel E/oosevelt has 
called its ^'lunatic fringe." It has its lunatic 
fringe, but it also has its center of idealism, and 
of Christian idealism, that we must not overlook. 
Fairness of mind, as one fully realizes, is pe- 
culiarly difficult now, in the midst of the struggle. 
We need all the help we can get, and the man who 
stands aside in such an issue, ^at such a supreme 
crisis of history, will receive short shrift from the 
majority. We call the pacifist a slacker, if not a 
traitor. He may very well be both, and it is not 
always easy to tell. He that is not with us is in 
effect lagainst us. The non-resistant, the consci- 
entions objector, talks provokingly like a pro- 
German. We wish him to curb his conscience be- 
fore it compels him to preach against conscription. 
Our house is on fire, and it is time, we think, for 
those who object to our method of putting it out 
to keep quiet and not hinder us in doing the neces- 
sary work. Germany simply puts the uncompro- 
mising pacifist to death, likewise France. In Great 
Britain and the United States, with a longer tra- 
dition of individual liberty, if he is abnoxious, he is 
put in prison. Either way, some injustice is prob- 
ably done to sincere pacifists, whose idealism is 
simply too unbending. I am thinking of one of 
the greatest of living English philosophers, whose 
books I have read with prof ound respect, Bertrand 

42 



THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM 

Russell. For some reason the En^lisli authorities 
have seen fit to put him in jail. I think he is a 
genuine martyr. 

It is well for us to remember that the Abolition- 
ists of half a century ago were pretty uncomfort- 
able people to live with, and some of them even 
openly advocated dissolving the Union. But they 
were profoundly right in moral principle, and in 
time the whole nation came to think as they did, 
except that the Union was saved. Their ravings 
never threw Abraham Lincoln off his balance. We 
need our idealists, even though they sometimes go 
to extremes. We ought to be strong enough to 
possess our souls and not be thrown into a panic. 
Those who are genuine pacifists, or genuine be- 
lievers in any form of faith, never complain of 
the degree of martyrdom to which they have to 
submit, knowing that thus the truth has ever been 
furthered, when it is the truth. The reward of 
the true pacifists will perhaps come only when 
their bones are dust. When there is no longer a 
militant Prussia to attack us, it may be that we 
shall all come to think as they do. 

That may serve as enough by way of sympa- 
thetic appreciation. What now shall we say of the 
difficulties that stand in the way of carrying out 
the pacifist program? I am not thinking simply 
of those that grow out of the immediate situation, 
but equally of those that will long, if not always, 
exi^t in the very nature of the case. It is a com- 
monplace of present-day thinking, given its chief 
impulse by the doctrine of evolution and especially 
by Darwin's teaching, that all life is a struggle for 

43 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

existence, resulting in the survival of the fittest. 
It is a serious error, however, to confine this teach- 
ing to the biological plane, and suppose it to mean 
the survival of the physically strongest. God is 
not, as Napoleon cynicaJlly dedared, always on the 
side of the biggest battalions. In human life, and 
even below the human level, the moral factor comes 
in. A single antelope may easily become a prey 
to the lion, but a herd of antelopes, by banding 
together and defending one another, may manage 
to outwit him. The drawing together of the Allied 
peoples, with ourselves now^ added, is the most 
wonderful demonstration of the power of this 
moral factor in evolution that history yet affords. 
On paper, and as a mere military calculation, 
Germany seemed bound to win. It looked like an 
absolutely certain demonstration. All those who 
are dazzled by physical power, whose secret if 
not avowed leaning is toward the materialistic in- 
terpretation of history, have repeatedly in their 
hearts conceded her the victory. Why should not 
guns and 'ammunition and organization, long pre- 
pared in advance, win the day? Simply because 
the world is not made on tho'se lines. Germany 
broke down at the Marne, again at Verdun, and 
she is apparently stopped now in Picardy and in 
Flanders. What does it mean? Why, that even 
armed force, to succeed, must call to its aid the 
invisible but potent moral factor. The magnificent 
resolution of the French at Verdun, with the 
watchword, ^^They shall not pass,'' was alone 
worth to them many divisions of fighting men. 
We have had it repeated in Field Marshal Haig's 

44 



THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM 

great recent order to the men of Britain to stand 
firm where they were and fight with their backs 
to the wall. That is a spirit which evokes in real 
men an almost miraculous courage and determina- 
tion. Any true man rises to double his strength in 
response to an appeal like that. The moral might 
of the world is roused against the material might 
of the Central Empires — which, however, as I 
showed in an earlier sermon, is not without its 
real though inferior moral factor — and we need 
have no fear of the final outcome. The embattled 
nations are deeply convinced of the sacredness of 
their cause, and with a single supreme command 
we may await the ultimate issue with confidence. 
What has just been said about the essential 
moral factor in the human struggle in no way in- 
validates the general law of conflict and survival. 
It simply raises it to the human plane. It is no- 
torious that the aggressive and militant peoples, 
those who most display the will to power, are not 
the more backward, but the more advanced, as 
regards the general arts of civilization. This is 
the astounding paradox with which we are con- 
fronted. India does not rule Britain, but Britain 
rules India. Unawakened China, notwithstanding 
her vast undeveloped resources as a military and 
naval power, is a model, except as shown in her 
recent internal strife, of contented pacifism. How 
long this passiveness will last is a problem for the 
future. The militancy of Japan has been in exact 
proportion to her progress in other directions, to 
her swift assimilation of the rest of western civil- 
ization. The genius of militarism in Germany is 

45 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

inextricably bound up with her leadership in the 
manifold forms of industrial organization. She 
professes war, and practices it, only as an exten- 
sion into another but adjacent field of her insati- 
able purpose of commercial and financial domina- 
tion. It has been truly said, by a pacifist writer, 
that in no other nation do we find leaders as patri- 
otic in their peculiar sense as those who direct 
the G-erman world-policy. To them Germany is 
everything, and all other nations are nothing. The 
advancement of German interests, by any and 
every means, is their be-all and end-all. '^If they 
can confer what they regard as benefits upon Ger- 
many, everything else is of no account." We are 
patriotic, some of us, but hardly to that extent. 

This is the temper of mind with which we have 
to deal. While Germany manifests it in an ex- 
treme form, of open and declared envy of other, 
peoples and determination to pull them down so 
that she may be built up, still she is not alone in 
showing this temper. Britain, France, and the 
United States — ourselves with our dollar diplo- 
macy — ^though with somewhat less crudity of 
method, are no less fixed in their determination to. 
hold fast to their present immense advantages. 
All alike are possessed by national egotism; and 
what we call patriotism in these several countries 
is largely devoted to upholding and enhancing this 
not wiholly pardonable pride of nationality. In 
diplomatic language, it is generally described by 
the phrase, '^our national honor and interest." 
What the national honor and interest seem to dic- 
tate, the patriotic part of the nation will always 

46 



THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM 

insist on enforcing, even by resort to arms. In 
the case of the United States this has meant, for 
nearly a hundred years, the application of the 
Monroe Doctrine to South America. Let certain 
foreign nations come over and threaten Vene- 
zuela, and the American people rise as one man to 
protest. In the case of Britain, it has meant the 
oppression of Ireland, the government of India, 
and making her power secure in South Africa and 
Egypt. In the case of France it has meant the 
appropriating for herself, and especially keeping 
Germany out of, the extensive commercial oppor- 
tunities in Morocco. The world at large, like each 
nation separately, is thus divided into two con- 
flicting interests — those w^ho have what they want, 
and those who lack it. Next Sunday, in the ser- 
mon on the War and the Social Revolution, we 
are to study the waging of this irrepressible con- 
flict within the life of every great modern nation. 
Today we confine ourselves to its waging between 
the leading nations themselves. 

Here we see the tremendously acute problem 
that any thorough-going pacifist has to face. It 
is the problem that brought on the European war. 
The older pacifism — that which antedated the out- 
break of this war and proposed the Hague 
Tribunal for international arbitration — never 
properly sensed its existence. To bring it sharply 
to the foreground, we may almost say the war was 
required. The situation is this : Britain, France, 
the United States and perhaps, though not cer- 
tainly, Russia, may be set off in a class by them- 
selves and called the satiated powers. They are 

47 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

like the man in the New Testament parable who 
had much goods laid up for many years. They 
possess all that even national egotism could 
wish. Their natural role is to hold fast what 
has been given them. Their controlling interest 
is to keep the world in its present groove iand 
prevent the upsetting of the balance of power; 
to make conditions static. Opposed to the nations 
of this class — even if for the present partly allied 
with them — is another group, including Germany, 
Japan and Italy, which may be placed together 
and called the hungry powers. They want, and 
their patriotic pride is constantly pushing them 
on to acquire, strategic and commercial advan- 
tages which are not now theirs. This accounts for 
Japan's two recent wars, with China and Eussia; 
and also for Italy's amazing attack on Turkey for 
the possession of Tripoli. It is for the interest of 
these hungry powers to upset the equilibrium, and 
that is just what Germany tried to do in 1914. It 
is clear enough now that this is what lies back of 
the Teutonic onslaught on civilization. 

Now, it is the fundamental nature of existence 
to be dynamic, not static. Not even the eternal 
hills stand as they are without change ; much less 
the animal and human species. Strive and obtain, 
relax and be eliminated — ^^that is the universal law. 
We see it working its results in every phase of 
competition. In business, to stand still is to go 
backward. Expansion is the driving force of 
strong natures ; contentment and slow decay is the 
soothing fate of weaker ones. Nations already 
successful have to keep themselves fit and firm 

48 



THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM 

to hold their place. Nations that would be greater 
have to equip and bestir themselves to win the 
desired success. 

The situation first became serious some thirty 
years ago when the outlying vacant lands in the 
uncivilized portions of the earth, especially in 
Africa and Western Asia, had been practically 
parcelled out among the world powers and there 
was no clear space left. For further expansion, 
for example, on the part of Germany, the latest 
comer at the feast, there was no escape, but to rest 
contented or to grasp something that belonged to 
somebody else. We, as citizens of a contented 
power, may ask, — not without a certain self-right- 
eousness — why could she not be contented? I 
tried in the opening sermon of this series to give 
some reasons why she cannot be. In any case, the 
spirit and purpose of her people — and not neces- 
sarily of her rulers only, as we now ought to per- 
ceive — is that she will not, and moreover cannot 
be foTced to, remain satisfied with what she has. 
Her approaching defeat may crush this spirit for 
a time, but not for always. Let us not deceive 
ourselves about that. This time she has failed of 
her aim, though only in part. She has made the 
rest of us suffer with her enough so that she will 
never again be ignored and set aside as she was 
by Britain and France over Morocco in 1911. I 
have no time at this point to go into that, which 
is one of the most instructive examples from re- 
cent history, little known to the multitude. While 
we were thrown into this war as a war for democ- 
racy, French and British imperialism have a meas- 

49 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

ure of responsibility for it that history will make 
clear. Germany's will to greater power may be 
foiled for the time, until she has been enabled to 
recover herself, but it is too much a part of her 
as a consciously strong and self-reliant nation to 
be permanently controlled short of her extermina- 
tion. Suppose the whole world had told us some 
years ago not to take the Hawaiian Islands? 
Would that have checked us! We might have 
waited for a time, but in the end we should have 
sought to realize what the great bulk of our people 
regard as our national destiny. 

This, then, is the problem of world-peace for 
the future. All the other related questions that 
form the staple of pacifist and anti-pacifist dis- 
cussion — conscription, military training of youth, 
arbitration, reduction of armaments, freedom of 
the seas — are, by comparison, merely side issues. 
The world of the future will either be ruled by 
might, or by some peaceable adjustment of right. 
In the one case, the free and democratic peoples 
will have to Prussianize themselves, as they 
have been doing feverishly for the last four years, 
ourselves as much as any since April, 1917. Not 
that we are adopting the Prussian ethics, but their 
methods of preparedness. That means permanent 
conscription, universal military training, a huge 
navy and perpetual war budgets, with exhausting 
taxation. It means a steady setback of all higher 
civilization, from which we are already suffering 
acutely, though under the pressure of present ex- 
citement we do not realize it. This alternative 
opens a perspective of recurring future wars that 

so 



THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM 

we do not care to look upon. Tlie other alternative 
is to invent some method of conference and 
friendly concession, whereby not only the claims 
of the Allied nations, some of which are among 
the hungry powers, may be adjusted, but whereby 
also 'the reasonable aspirations of German na- 
tional feeling may be met and somehow satisfied. 

Does this seem to any of you a lame and impo- 
tent conclusion? If so, I am not surprised. The 
American public just now is being worked up into 
a frenzy of just wrath against German atrocities 
and crimes against humanity. For those crimes 
and atrocities, I have only stern condemnation, like 
all right-thinking men. For the way Germany has 
gone about what she desired to accomplish, there 
can be no excuse. But that she had and has a case 
to press against the satiated powers, I do not think 
will be questioned by any man of true vision of 
realities in his right senses who knows the situ- 
ation as it is. This the newspapers alone cannot 
be trusted to give us. We have to read recent his- 
tory, and see what were the legitimate aspira- 
tions of Germany, which she felt that the world as 
it was organized before the war was united to 
deny her. 

Even with our moral condemnation upon her, 
Germany is still too great, and too essential to the 
future peace of the rest of us, not to deserve and 
finally to have her rightful place in the sun, what- 
ever that place may be. The agencies of the new 
pacifism, which are to work out this consumma- 
tion, are yet to be created. Germany herself must 
first repent and undergo a difficult inner trans- 
si 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

formation. She must learn to live in the world on 
decent terms with the rest of us. Her people must 
seize the helm of state from her militaristic rul- 
ers. Also the powers against her must calm 
their, at present needful, belligerent passions and 
some day sit down to talk it all over rationally and 
with the fullest possible mutual respect and under- 
standing. No one can have read discerningly the 
speeches and messages of President Wilson with- 
out seeing that this is one of his guiding aims — to 
defeat Germany first, then to settle the outstand- 
ing issues in such a way that she will be ready to 
live in harmony with the other world-powers. How 
America must lead in it all is to be the topic of the 
three concluding sermons of my series. 



52 



SERMON IV 

THE WAR AND THE SOCIAL 
REVOLUTION 



The people that ivalked in darkness have seen a 
great light; they that divelt in the land of the 
shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. 

— Isaiah ix. 2. 



The two most surprising developments of the 
great war, entirely unforeseen when it began, have 
been the revolution in Bussia and the entrance of 
the United States among the coimbatants. Which 
of these wo rid- shaking events will have the more 
far-reaching consequences, w^e are not now in a 
position to tell. Only the historian of the future, 
when he comes to look back on this twentieth cen- 
tury and sum it all up, as we look back on the 
eighteenth, can decide that. One present-day 
writer declares that ''No change which the w^ar 
may bring about can equal the contribution of the 
Russian Revolution to the democratic progress of 
Europe." Another, with no less positiveness of 
conviction, says: "The Russian Revolution, stu- 
pendous though it is, pales as a portent in human 
affairs before the appearance of the United States 
as a formidable military power bent on a battle 
for peace in the heart of Europe." The contradic- 
tion in these two statements disappears when we 

53 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

view the two events as intimately and profoundly 
related one with the other. Together they have 
done more than anything else that conld have hap- 
pened to enlarge the scope and define the character 
of the struggle as a war of autocracy against 
democracy. 

Whatever may have been the immediate causes 
of the war, it has come to reveal its connection 
with other and deeper-lying conditions of the 
world-life, in a way that is gradually becoming 
clearer to our understanding. If it had remained — 
what it seemed likely to be at the outset — an attack 
of two great military powers, Germany and Aus- 
tria, upon two other great military powers, Rus- 
sia and France ; or even if it had come to be — 
what some observers think it chiefly is — the death- 
grapple of Teutonic with Anglo-^Saxon imperial- 
ism for the prize of domination in the world's mar- 
kets; — all that would have been explicable in the 
familiar terms of the older world-order, with its 
jealous balance of power and its intense trade 
rivalry. Then we could look for nothing radically 
new, nothing having in itself the seeds of the fu- 
ture. The new note was struck with the dramatic 
dethroning of the Czar, Nicholas II, the autocrat 
of All the Russias, in March, 1917, and with the 
declaration of war a month later by this mighty 
militant democracy of the western hemisphere. 
The coincidence of these two events is what prom- 
ises to make the present one of the turning-points 
of human history. Let us lift up our hearts ! * ^ The 
people that walked in darkness have seen a great 
light; they that dwelt in the land of the shadow 

54 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION 

of death, upon them hath the light shined.'' The 
sermons still to come will be devoted to bringing 
ont America's participation in the war and what 
is implied in it. The aim of this sermon will be 
to interpret to you the broader significance of the 
Russian Revolution. 

The situation in Russia cannot be grasped in 
isolation, or as unrelated to a like struggle, if less 
aggravated, that is going on within each of the 
other nations involved, including our own. I want 
to start ri^ht today by helping you to see that our 
struggle against autocracy and that of the Rus- 
sian people are, at heart, one and the same thing; 
that Russia needs our wise comprehension and 
far-sighted sympathy more than any other of the 
peoples involved, more even than Belgium, more 
even than France ; and that a failure of percep- 
tion and imagination on our part toward the new 
Russia may easily lead to a miserable failure of 
our attempt to pull down autocracy and set up 
democracy in its place. The tone of much current 
American comment, in the press and elsewhere, 
shows that the danger of this tragic mishap, of 
our not understanding, is both real and pressing. 

There has been a marked cooling down of our 
first spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm for revo- 
lutionary Russia, since we have seen that its inner 
ferment has meant the disintegration of the army 
and the throwing of a double burden on the west- 
ern front. Our feeling now is different from what 
we felt at first, and the spokesmen of Allied opin- 
ion in their natural disappointment over the im- 
mediate outlook — President Wilson being a 

55 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

notable exception — have been especially severe 
on the present ill-starred rulers of that distraught 
land — the Bolsheviki. Their leaders, Lenine and 
Trotsky, are said to be pro-German, and in the 
pay of the German autocracy. The cJiarge is 
plausible, in view of all that has happened, and 
the evidence is not at hand with which completely 
to refute it. At the same time, the best in- 
formation' we have is entirely against this view- 
point. I am satisfied that it is absolutely contrary 
to the truth, and based on an abysmal ignorance 
of what these men represent. With a lead like 
that, American opinion is in danger of getting no- 
where in understanding what has actually taken 
place in that far-off land. There is another reason 
for lukewarmness. The very thought of revolu- 
tion is apt to be distasteful to many of us, com- 
fortably settled down in our own affairs and with 
our little corner of the world arranged to our 
personal liking. Although this nation had its rise 
in a revolution, I suppose no people on earth are 
farther from desiring anything of the sort than 
the average of educated and well-to-do Americans. 
As regards our internal situation, at least, we all 
could join with complete earnestness of spirit 
in the petition of the Prayer Book, ^^Give peace 
in our time, Lord ! ' ' What we want is to have 
things stay about as they are, and ourselves to 
stay about as we have been. 

It requires an effort of the imagination — in 
which we as a people are not conspicuously gifted 
— to enter into the totally different life of the 
Russian masses. Yet if imagination should fail 

56 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION 

us, the instinct for fundamental democracy may 
not, particularly if it can be re-enforced by our 
keen national scent for business chances. Russia 
offers one of the greatest existing business oppor- 
tunities on earth, and if it does not appeal to us 
in any other sense it ought to appeal to us in that. 
In every way the United States has in greatest 
abundance what Russia most painfully lacks. Her 
people know this well; ours are not yet awake to 
it. Not our political institutions exactly — those 
we cannot transmit to a people so unlike ourselves, 
except in their most general spirit — ^but our 
methods of popular education and especially of 
machine-production in industry and agriculture, 
these Russia needs with an acuteness that most of 
us little realize. Germany is not waiting for us to 
take the initiative. Even now, she is hastening 
the process of Germanizing Russia, at which she 
has been engaged for generations. She has the 
great advantage of proximity, but we have the 
immensely greater advantage of possessing the 
natural sympathy and admiration of the Russian 
people ; if we do not throw it away by the in- 
credible stupidity of measuring everything they 
do by the little foot-rule of our standards of pro- 
priety. Either Russia will be progressively Ger- 
manized, in which case autocracy will take on a 
new lease of life in Europe, whose end no one can 
foresee ; or she will be progressively American- 
ized, in whidh case democracy and liberty will be 
the coming heritage of her people, and she will 
inaugurate a progress the end of which is equally 
hidden in the unimaginable future. More Ger- 

57 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

mans can speak Eussian than all the rest of the 
outside world put together. There ought to he 
established in every American university chairs 
of the Russian language and literature, side by 
side with chairs of Spanish. Shall we do it! It 
has not been the American way to show our enter- 
prise in this fashion until Germany has distanced 
us by half a century. We must begin to send out 
Americans speaking foreign languages as mission- 
aries of Americanism to combat the ever-growing 
horde of the missionaries of German Kultur, 

It is with a feeling of trying to perform the im- 
possible that I undertake to describe to you, within 
the limits of a sermon, the vast and comprehensive 
social change which has brought Russia, the very 
stronghold of autocracy and bureaucracy, with ap- 
parent suddenness, into the situation where she is 
today. Conditions are so extraordinarily complex 
and difficult, and there are so many unknown fac- 
tors. Autocracy is scotched but not killed. Social 
democracy, in the European party sense, is just 
now in the saddle, but may not long remain there. 
The great bulk of the nation is waiting, inar- 
ticulate, for the next turn of affairs. Prophecy 
with conditions as they are is foolishness, and yet 
some lines of tendency are not wholly obscure. 

Not to go back too far, the incompetence, cor- 
ruption and utter selfishness of the hereditary 
autocracy was startlingly brought out by the mis- 
management of the war with Japan in 1904-05. 
The whole nation then rose in angry protest, and 
as a result of a long series of revolutionary mani- 
festations, in which all classes joined, the absolute 

58 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION 

monarchy was frightened into granting conces- 
sions under the form of a paper constitution. 
There never was any intention of carrying these 
out, and they never were put into effect, so that 
the last state of the nation, 1906-17, was worse 
than the first. Wliat the people wanted were the 
elementary civil rights that obtain in every mod- 
ern free democracy, whether organized as a re- 
public or as a constitutional monarchy — universal 
suffrage, free speech and a free press, the right 
of peaceable assembly and association — which are 
the inheritance of men of English speech and are 
given classic form in the American Declaration of 
Independence. None of these had ever existed in 
Russia down to the time of the revolution last 
year. 

The length to which autocratic oppression had 
gone, both before and after the uprising of 1904- 
05, absolutely beggars description. Every grop- 
ing toward a larger freedom was relentlessly sup- 
pressed. Any assertion of what we regard as the 
primary rights of the individual was treated as 
a conspiracy against the government of the Czar. 
No crime, no atrocity that Germany has been 
guilty of in Belgium, or Turkey in Armenia, is 
lacking in the terrible record of what the ministers 
and subordinate minions of the Russian state did 
to their suffering countrymen. The details, which 
can not be given here, may be found in abundance 
in that remarkable book, '^The Soul of the Rus- 
sian Revolution,'' by Moissaye J. Olgin, which 
every American should read. It is significant that 
the Russians themselves called the autocrats and 

59 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

their hirelings, many of whom had German 
origins and connections, the ''Russian-Germans." 
If one could repeat here at full length, as Mr. Olgin 
describes it, the story of just one punitive expedi- 
tion against certain railroad employees who were 
peaceably striving to better their conditions, it 
would make your blood run cold. Many of the 
officers concerned had German names. The order 
given was ''to make no prisoners and to act mer- 
cilessly." It was carried out to the letter. And 
this was only one incident of hundreds and thou- 
sands in the years of reaction. We ourselves 
heard some faint echoes of the pogroms, or mas- 
sacres of the Jews, the worst of which was at 
Kishineff. The government itself organized the 
notorious "Black Hundreds," gangs of bandits, 
ruffians and cutthroats, who were given license by 
the police and the authorities to terrorize whole 
communities and cow the people into silence and 
submission. The Czar himself was a member of 
that despicable organization, the Black Hundreds. 
Compared with the Russian autocracy, the Ger- 
man, before the war broke out, appears almost in 
the guise of angels of light, though since 1914 they 
have only too faithfully followed the Russian 
model. 

Ninety per cent of the Russian people are peas- 
ants, living on the land and deeply attached to it. 
Sixty years ago they were raised from their for- 
mer condition of serfdom and given a limited free- 
dom. Except for the large proprietors, who be- 
long to the aristocracy, there was until shortly 
before the revolution no private ownership of land 

60 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION 

among the Russian masses. The land was owned 
by the village community and parcelled out for 
cultivation. By that arrangement, few peasants 
received enough to work on to keep themselves and 
their families much above the starvation point. 
Famines were frequent and destructive. The one 
cry of one hundred and sixty millions of the Rus- 
sian people is for better access to the land. This 
represents the full and steady current of the 
national life, in contrast with which the industrial 
disturbances in the towns are the merest foam on 
the surface. Here we begin to get the proportions 
right. Nine out of ten oriRnary Russians want but 
one thing — enough land to bring up their families 
on. Private ownership of land is the most stable 
force in any nation, against which the assaults of 
Socialism and Bolshevikism beat in vain. The 
Russian peasantry, like the French, is one of the 
most conservative and reliable forces in the world. 
It is grossly illiterate, and retrograde in many of 
its methods and ideas. Its urgent need is for 
schooling and especially for modern farm machin- 
ery. But it is essentially sound and loyal, and 
taken together makes one of the largest and finest 
funds of undeveloped human material to be found 
anywhere upon earth. It is the firm ballast in the 
ship of state. No Bolshevik agitations, not even 
the German conquest, can make any lasting im- 
pression on this magnificent wealth of common 
Russian humanity. It stands like a rock and al- 
ways will stand — nothing can shake it. 

The bulk of the Russian army was recruited 
from the peasantry. When the Czar fell, it lost 

61 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

its idol and was cut adrift. Now here is a point 
of the first importance. The war, to the rank and 
file of the army, was a war of autocracy, of im- 
perialism. The soldiers f ougiht because they were 
ordered to fight. 

Theirs not to reason wTiy, 
Theirs but to do or die. 

But when the revolution left them free to think, 
they could come to hut one conclusion, and that was 
that this was not and never had been their war. It 
was impossible that they should take any such view 
of it as the free citizens of the western democracies 
— France, G-reat Britain and the United States. 
They had never been anything but slaves to the 
will of the Czar, and when this bondage was sud- 
denly removed they were dazed. Two ideas pos- 
sessed them — to have peace, and to get back to the 
land. The collapse of the Russian army was the 
collapse of the old autocracy, not of the new de- 
mocracy. "We may be sure of that. "When there 
is a democratic army in Russia it will be as invin- 
cible as were the troops of the French Revolution. 
There is one thing on earth that cannot be defeat- 
ed, and that is a democratic army. 

The factor that has been crucially wanting thus 
far in the Russian nation, in anything like its due 
proportion, is the great, powerful, directing busi- 
ness and professional class, known in the terms 
employed in European party discussion as the 
bourgeoisie. This is the class that actually rules 
in America, Great Britain and France, and that 
was rapidly advancing to control in Germany, 

62 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION 

only held back by the junkers and the military 
autocracy, which won a dubious triumph in the 
declaration of war. It was growing fast in Rus- 
sia from about 1900, but was still, unfortunately, 
in the mere infancy of its rightful power. The 
true strength and promise of the Russian democ- 
racy, as of every other, lies in this body of earned 
wealth, proved competence, professional knowl- 
edge and skill, and personal light and leading — 
what Burke called the ^^ natural aristocracy." If 
there had been ten million people of this kind in all 
Russia, the situation would be entirely different 
today. To this element, because of its superior 
governing ability, the rule of new Russia in time 
must inevitably fall. From it were taken most of 
the first cabinet after the abdication of the Czar — 
men like Prince Lvoff, Prof. Milyukoff, and their 
associates. They had come to the front in the 
Zemstvos or local and provincial assemblies, and 
in the Duma, the national parliament. They stood 
for cabinet government on the model of western 
democracies. Why did they fall, almost imme- 
diately after they came into power? Here we 
come upon another open secret of present-day 
revolutionary Russia, parallel to the collapse of 
the army. These men came from a class as yet too 
limited in number, too little understood, and too 
insecure in control. They fell, almost at once, 
from a lack of popular understanding and sup- 
port. Then, after the short but brilliant regime of 
Kerensky, who, though of Socialist origin and 
sympathies, was in reality fast emerging into the 
rank of bourgeois statesmanship, came the sud- 

63 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

den and staggering entrance to supreme power of 
the Bolsheviki. 

The Bolsheviki! An unfamiliar, foreign, 
strange-sounding word like that — like Kultur — is 
the kind of thing with which average British 
and American public opinion simply loves to 
muddle itself, and dress up in it all its dear, de- 
lightful prejudices. It fits in with Mr. Dooley and 
his Irish humor. The Bolsheviki — it is to laugh! 
Then, all of a sudden, it becomes no laughing mat- 
ter. What is a Bolsheviki He is a man who, to 
use a term that has good standing in English his- 
tory, believes in the policy of '^thorough.'' He 
is a straight-out, undiluted Marxian socialist, 
under the skin of a typical Russian revolutionist. 
When he starts out, he goes through to the end. 
That policy is always respectable, though often 
misunderstood. To call him an agent of the Ger- 
man or any other autocracy is thinking worthy of 
an asjdum for the feeble-minded. And yet, because 
he is a radical extremist, he may unintentionally, 
for a time, play into the hands of the opposite ex- 
treme, as the Russian Bolsheviki have certainly 
done. 

I am not speaking here at random. I have read, 
as few Americans have yet had time to do, the 
two striking books by Leon Trotsky, the former 
Russian exile and New York Jewish newspaper 
reporter who, with Nicolai Lenine, was at the head 
of the Bolshevik government in Petrograd. This 
remarkable writer and pu'blicist, with the courage 
of a consistent set of convictions, is the prophet 
of the proletariat — to use another term of Euro- 

64 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION 

peaii party strife — ^^tlie wage-earning*, hand-to- 
moutli-existing, laboring masses. These are the 
people of the cities and the industrial centers. 
They constitute less than ten per cent of the total 
Eussian population. What hold the Bolsheviki 
have over the peasantry on the land remains to be 
demonstrated. There is no reason to think it is, 
or ever will be, great; any more than our city 
Socialism gets hold of the American farmers as a 
class. Keep in mind this proportion — ten per cent 
in agitation, and ninety per cent that makes up 
the unshakable, conservative fabric of the nation ; 
and then hearing about the Bolsheviki will be less 
like seeing an unpleasant, menacing ghost. 

Lenine and Trotsky were the chosen leaders of 
the class-conscious, labor minority. They derived 
their power from the Soviets, or councils of work- 
men and soldier delegates in the industrial centers. 
They came to the front because these bodies, like 
the peasants at large, distrusted the war as an 
adventure of capitalistic imperialism. I cannot 
hope to enable you to enter fully into their state of 
mind — ^^that which leads them to think of ourselves, 
for example, as in this war as an enterprise for 
capitalistic expansion and the control of world- 
markets. They know us about as little as we know 
them, and misunderstanding on both sides is but 
natural. There is, unfortunately, just enough 
color of capitalistic imperialism in the attitude of 
all the western European powers to give a certain 
justification to this distrust. The economic con- 
ference in Paris, designed to isolate Germany 
commercially after the war, was fuel on the fire 

65 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

of Bolshevik distrust of the democracy of the Al- 
lied cause. 

Now what was the Bolshevik program, before 
the German conquest and the enforced peace 
brought in a new and as yet unascertainable fac- 
tor? Trotsky puts it succinctly in one of the later 
pages of his book, ^^The Bolsheviki and World 
Peace,'' an appeal to German and Austrian social 
democracy written since the war began. ^*No con- 
tributions (i.e., no indemnities) ; the right of every 
nation to self-determination; the United States 
of Europe, without monarchies, without standing 
armies, without ruling feudal castes, without se- 
cret diplomacy." He prints these demands in 
capitals, to show their importance. Except for 
the first, this is our own American program, as 
well as that of world-democracy everywhere. The 
only question is as to precisely what is meant by 
^^no indemnities.'' The article on indemnities 
should be interpreted, probably, as meaning no 
indemnities such as Germany wrung from France 
in 1871, and is planning to wring from the rest of 
us if she wins this war; not such as the Allies will 
require for the restoration of Belgium, France, 
Serbia, Poland and Armenia. ^ From our point of 
view, it is not a just, but an unjust, indemnity 
which the Russian democratic program repudiates. 

It has been the policy of a large and influential 
section of our press, trading on the dense ignor- 
ance of the average American regarding condi- 
tions in eastern Europe, to class the Bolsheviki 
with our I. W. W.'s and other extreme social revo- 
lutionary factions. There is just enough resem- 

66 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION 

blance between them to give a passing currency to 
the theory. But let me quote on the other side 
Ernest Poole, an American writer who knows 
Russia at first hand. His recent book, ^ ^ The Dark 
People," is a flashlight on Russian conditions to- 
day, and deserves, with Olgin^s book on *^The Soul 
of the Russian Revolution," to be read by every 
thinking American. He says: ^'With all their 
faults, the Bolsheviki have done more than all the 
diplomats to lay naked the blind, brutal greed of 
the powers who still rule in Berlin. ' ' And he adds, 
most significantly, ^^ Already, the Bolsheviki give 
indications of slowing down. * * * In an interview, 
Trotsky has said that instead of taking over at 
once the factories and mills and mines, they pro- 
pose to leave them for a time to be run by their 
present owners, subject to government control. 
For how long he does not say. But it may well be, 
if he and his friends succeed in remaining in con- 
trol, that with the fast increasing load of respon- 
sibilities, the Bolsheviki will settle down to a long, 
protracted series of deep and fundamental reforms 
that wdll first meet the immediate needs and will 
then lead slowly through the years to that same 
co-operative commonwealth which both they and 
co-operatives and Socialists of every kind through- 
out the world have dreamed of. ' ' Is not a rule like 
this infinitely to be preferred to that of the old 
autocracy? 

There is no profit now in following the Russian 
revolution farther. Its next step depends too pal- 
pably on the general march of events. What, in 
conclusion, of the wider application of its lessons 

67 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

to the social revolution everywhere? Just this: 
Democracy means the rule of the majority; in 
other words, that in the long run we shall have to 
use concession, rather than coercion, with the la- 
boring masses. They can be led; they can no 
longer be driven. The best of them know very 
well that they require wiser and more intelligent 
guidance than they are able of themselves to fur- 
nish. The fiasco in Russia gives the latest of many 
proofs of that. It also gives startling proof that 
without broad, popular support, even the natural 
aristocracy of business and professional leader- 
ship is impotent. Autocracy is dangerously effi- 
cient, but at a heavy cost to the common man. 
Democracy has tended hitherto to set aside and 
discount the man of natural or acquired superior- 
ity. The two systems are struggling for life. 
On the part of democracy it is the highest wisdom 
to keep together, to make the needed mutual con- 
cessions, to promote a tolerant understanding, to 
avoid going to extremes and to base theory on 
tried experience. 

One of the most suggestive of our American 
poets, William Vaughn Moody, in his poem, 
*' Gloucester Moors,'' has thrown into high relief 
the problem that here concerns us. I quote only in 

part : 

This earth is not the steadfast place 

We landsmen budld upon; 

From deep to deep she varies pace, 

And while she comes is gone. 

Beneath my feet I feel 

Her smooth bulk heave and dip; 

With velvet plunge and soft upreel 

She swings and steadies to her keel 

Like a gallant, gallant ship. 

68 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION 

These summer clouds she sets for sail, 

The sun is her masthead light, 

She tows the moon like a pinnace frail 

Where her phosphor wake churns bright 

Now hid, now looming clear, 

On the face of the dangerous blue 

The star fleets tack and wheel and veer, 

But on, but on does the old earth steer 

As if her port she knew. 

God, dear God! does she know her port, 

Though she goes so far about? 

Or blind astray, does she make her sport 

To brazen and chance it out? 

I watched when her captains passed: 

She 'Were better captainless. 

Men in the cabin, ^before the mast. 

But some were reckless and some aghast. 

And some sat gorged at mess. 

By her battened hatch I leaned and caught 

Sounds from the noisome hold, — 

Cursing and sighing of souls distraught ) 

And cries too sad to be told. 

Then I strove to go down and see; i 

But they said, "Thou art not of us!" 

I turned to those on the deck with me J 

And cried, "Give help!" But they said, 

"Let be: 
Our ship sails faster thus." 

Scattering wide or blown in ranks, 
Yellow and white and brown. 
Boats and boats from the fishing banks, 
Come home to Gloucester town. 
There is cash to purse and spend. 
There are wives to be embraced. 
Hearts to borrow and hearts to lend 
And hearts to take and keep to the end, — 
O little sails, make haste! 

69 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

But thou, vast outbound ship of souls, 

What harbor town for thee? 

What shapes, when thy arriving tolls. 

Shall crowd the banks to see? 

Shall all the happy shipmates then 

Stand singing brotherly? 

Or shall a haggard ruthless few 

Warp her over and bring her to, 

While the many .broken souls of men 

Fester down in the slaver's pen, 

And nothing to say or do? 

That is the issue of autocracy against democ- 
racy — whether a haggard, ruthless few shall for- 
ever dominate the broken souls of men, or at the 
end of the voyage all the happy shipmates stand, 
singing brotherly! 



70 



SERMON V 

THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER 
IN THE WAR 



They,that go down to the sea in ships, that do 
business in great waters; these see the works of 
the Lord and his wonders in the deep. 

— Psalm cvii. 23-24. 



Though most of the warfare of the past four 
years has taken place on the land, not all of it has 
been waged there ; war upon and underneath the 
ocean, for the first time on so large a scale in 
history, has claimed hardly less universal atten- 
tion. After the shock that followed the sinking 
of the Lusitania, it was Germany's submarine 
campaign, with its successive acts of lawless bru- 
tality and utter disregard of solemn pledges, that 
finally wore out the patience of even President 
Wilson and brought about our declaration of war. 
The President said, a few days before Congress 
declared war: *^The present German submarine 
warfare against commerce is a warfare against 
mankind. It is a war against all nations.'' The 
submarine, backed by ithe most modern science 
and skill, has indeed proven a terrible weapon of 
destruction. Hundreds of staunch steamers and 
sailing ships, ranging in size from fishing smacks 

71 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

of tlie North Sea to giant Atlantic liners, now lie 
at the bottom of the ocean with all their wealth of 
cargoes an utter loss. With them there have been 
sacrificed an unknown toll of human lives — some 
combatants, more non-combatants, including many 
innocent, peaceable travelers, men, women and 
little children. The German mania for destruc- 
tion has raged on the sea as on the land. Wherever 
her power has extended, Germany has done her 
utmost — and it is not to be despised as an effort, 
whatever we must think of its infernal spirit and 
purpose — to make a desert of the one and a grave- 
yard of the other. 

But startling and unprecedented as the work 
of the submarine has been, that is not the only 
manifestation of sea power of which we have been 
the astonished witnesses. The first year of the 
war, and indeed the first weeks and months, saw 
almost as complete a disappearance of the German 
merchant marine from the seven seas — where its 
flag had been so constantly in evidence — as if 
swept away by a mighty broom. That broom of 
course was the unparalleled navy of Britain, which 
for all these months has patrolled the North Sea 
and the Atlantic, and kept the formidable German 
navy, except for one brief unlucky dash, sealed 
up in the Kiel Canal and the Baltic. The French 
and Italian navies have helped, especially in the 
Mediterranean; and, in the last year, our own 
navy has rendered notable service in protecting 
commerce, transporting troops and destroying 
submarines. In the Pacific, Japan has quietly and 
effectively done her part. It is a war, for the first 

72 



THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER 

time, in all the elements — the land, the sea, and the 
air. My purpose in this sermon is to indicate to 
you something of the influence on the course of 
the struggle of the factor known as sea power. 

This is an intricate and technical subject, on 
which I can claim no special competence. More- 
over, the naval history of the war will remain for 
some time to come the professional secret of those 
in control of operations. We know a small part 
of what has happened, we are far from knowing 
all. Still less can we conjecture what possible new 
developments are to be expected. At the same 
time, the question of sea power is of such out- 
standing importance and such obvious influence 
in a war on the present world-scale that it is im- 
possible, in a discussion of the vital issues of the 
war, entirely to ignore it. I shall ask you to con- 
sider it with me in relation, first, to the causes of 
the war, then to its conduct, and finally to its prob- 
able conclusion. 

The influence of sea power on warfare generally, 
from the earliest time of fighting triremes among 
the Greeks and Romans, down through the era of 
sailing ships and frigates, to the dreadnoughts and 
battle cruisers of today, was first given adequate 
consideration by the late Admiral A. T. Mahan 
of the United States Navy. In the year 1890, 
Captain Mahan, as he then was, published his 
epoch-making book on ''The Influence of Sea 
Power Upon History.'' This was followed in the 
last dozen years of the author's life by a series 
of weighty and important works applying and ex- 
tending the principles originally formulated. In 

73 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britan- 
nica the reader who lacks time to digest these 
many fascinating volumes will find a clear outline 
of the subject in a few pages under the heading 
^*'Sea Power/' It is a matter that no one who 
wishes to gain a true comprehension of the pres- 
ent and coming world situation should neglect. 
Particularly we in the United States, who for 
about a century have been curiously oblivious to 
its critical bearing on our own national future, 
need awakening on ithe problems and responsi- 
bilities of sea power. 

The main lines of Admiral Mahan's exposition 
are easy of comprehension, when once they are 
set before us. The three essential links in the sea 
power of the greater and of many of the lesser 
nations are these : First, every modern industrial 
people produces more goods of certain kinds than 
it can use, and finds it natural to dispose of the 
surplus by sending it across the great, open com- 
mon of the ocean to prospective customers in for- 
eign markets. Second, this implies a sea-borne 
commerce which in time of war may need, and 
usually will need, armed protection. Third, the 
more ambitious trading nations have found it con- 
venient and necessary to possess themselves of 
favorable ports of entry and coaling stations, 
where their ships of both war and peace may find 
facilities for the pursuit of their various errands. 
These, according to Mahan, are the controlling 
elements in sea power — production, commerce and 
colonies. In times of quiet, all legitimate traders 
enjoy the complete freedom of the seas, as did the 

74 



THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER 

Germans with their immense ocean commerce, 
which grew by leaps and bounds down to their 
fatal plunge into war. Inevitably it is in war times 
that power to control the sea becomes of critical, 
and usually, as Admiral Mahan has shown, of de- 
cisive importance. 

Mastery on the ocean has been struggled for, 
in all the centuries of which history preserves any 
record, as earnestly as mastery on the land. Like- 
wise it has passed from one people to another; 
from the Spanish and Portuguese to the Dutch and 
French, and then definitively — since Nelson's vic- 
tory at Trafalgar, which blocked Napoleon's in- 
tended invasion of England a hundred years ago — 
to the British race. Britain long has been, and still 
is, by far the greatest trading and colonizing na- 
tion the world has ever known. Her situation on an 
island, or islands, has made seafaring the natural 
outlet for a large fraction of the native energy and 
enterprise of her people. They have been great 
as merchant-adventurers and peaceful colonizers, 
rather than as armed conquerors ; on the whole, 
war has been merely incidental and secondary to 
trade. Admitting some dark blots in their long 
and chequered career, the British have built much 
and destroyed little. They have stood for free- 
dom and justice, and a healthy give and take in 
human relations. They have, like every other 
great people, an instinct for domination, but it has 
been kept in the main remarkably under control. 
From the time of Elizabeth, when the defeat of 
the Spanish Armada secured the liberties of Eng- 
land, a powerful navy has been essential to their 

75 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

national existence. Since Trafalgar, the pre- 
dominance of British sea power has never been 
seriously challenged nntil now. 

It is by no mere coincidence that, about the time 
when Admiral Mahan was defining the laws of 
naval supremacy, the present intelligent, ambitious 
and almost abnormally restless Kaiser, Wilhelm 
II, ascended the throne of Grermany. Following 
in the footsteps of his royal ancestors, — the new 
empire which Bismarck and "Wilhelm I had reared 
over the prostrate body of France being but 
twenty years old — he continued training and in- 
creasing the German army until it was by far the 
most powerful in the world. This, however, was 
not enough. Affected, undoubtedly, by the new 
perception of the importance of sea power, the 
young Kaiser overthrew the tradition of Bismarck, 
who had scouted the idea of colonies, and began 
to scheme for them. It is reasonable to believe 
that 'the writings of Admiral Mahan were directly 
influential in this change. Declaring that Ger- 
many's future lay on the ocean, the Kaiser inaug- 
urated the building of a navy second in power only 
to that of Britain, and threatening rapidly to over- 
take that. He also rushed to completion the Kiel 
Canal, connecting the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic 
Ocean, through territory seized from Denmark in 
1864. At about the same time, by a piece of clever 
diplomacy, Lord Salisbury, then Prime Minister 
of England, was cajoled into exchanging the little 
rocky island of Heligoland, in the North Sea off 
the entrance to the proposed canal — of great stra- 
tegic value to Germany — ^for some comparatively 

76 



THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER 

unimportant territory in Africa. Here, then, in 
this consistent and well-conceived policy of the 
rulers of the German Empire, we may see a spe- 
cific antecedent to the present conflict. 

Britain, Japan, and ourselves, at any rate, 
among the nations engaged, would have been in- 
definitely less likely to have been drawn into the 
struggle if the control of sea power, with its three 
essential links of production, commerce, and col- 
onies, had not been directly involved. With the 
naval factor left out, the attack of G-ermany and 
Austria upon Russia and France in 1914 might 
have been a great war ; it would hardly, or at least 
not necessarily, have become a world-war. Plac- 
ing the naval factor in the foreground, we may 
even come to think of the war as primarily not 
one of land conquest, but of struggle for command 
of the sea. So Professor Albert Bushnell Hart 
describes it in his careful treatise on '^The Mon- 
roe Doctrine.'' ^^The main object -of the war of 
1914 between Germany and the western Allies," 
says Professor Hart, writing toward the end of 
1915, '4s to test their sea power and to dispute 
their possession of colonies." This comes as near 
to locating the taprroot of the conflict as anything 
that has come under my observation. For the 
British Empire, in posses-sion of one-quarter of 
the land surface of the globe, to maintain the pre- 
dominance of its fighting fleet is simply a question 
of life or death. In the last decade before the war, 
the mad race of naval armaments, led by Germany, 
had begnin to strain even the huge fabric of British 
finance. Successive British governments had ad- 

11 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

vanced proposals for a naval holiday, but to no 
avail. Germany replied bluntly that her building 
program was conceived, and would be carried out, 
solely in her own national interest and without re- 
gard to any other power. So the weary British 
Titan had to struggle forward with his almost in- 
tolerable burden. The origins of the war date 
back to the conception and creation of the new 
German navy. Without that there might have 
been a war, but it would not have been this war. 
So much for the influence of sea power in caus- 
ing the war. In its conduct we have had a succes- 
sion of surprises. One has been the demonstrated 
and overpowering superiority, up to now, c£ Brit- 
ish over German naval strength. Events may be 
in store, as a part of the last desperate German 
offensive, of which we can have little prevision. 
The fleet in the Kiel Canal may be ordered out, 
and may show itself as overwhelming in strength 
as has the German armament on land. It is safe 
to assume that nothing has been left undone that 
could be done in this direction. But one large dis- 
count must be made. The Germans are not native 
to the sea, as are the British and even ourselves — 
though with us the habit had become almost 
atrophied. Night and day, through heat and cold, 
for four long years, some part of the British grand 
fleet has patrolled the foggy northern seas, and 
been every moment ready. The Germans, how- 
ever they may have exercised their crews in theory 
and in lesser manoeuvers, have been completely 
land-locked. If they come out, it will be to almost 
certain, disastrous defeat. The honor of their flag 

78 



THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER 

is sadly tarnished by the wilful slaughter of de- 
fenceless merchantmen and fishermen. This is 
something worse than any possible defeat. They 
have made a few ineffectual raids on unfortified 
English coast towns. Their main strength has 
gone to their submarine campaign. 

I do not intend to waste any violent language 
in denunciation of that. It has been dealt with by 
President Wilson and many others as it deserves. 
Nothing more remains fto be said. As naval 
strategy, directed against the fighting ships of 
the enemy or to protect the home coasts from in- 
vasion, submarine warfare has come, in these ter- 
rible days of steel and high explosives, to have its 
legitimate place. It is not the submarine, but the 
barbarous use made of it, that is open to criticism. 
So far as we know, Germany has made practically 
no regular use of this weapon. Her object has 
been to destroy the commerce and starve the peo- 
ple and hinder the military effectiveness of the 
British Isles. In pursuit of this aim — not wholly 
outlawed by the rules of war, so long as Britain 
was equally determined to starve her people and 
hinder their military effectiveness by a rigid 
blockade — still, Germany has acted with a ruth- 
lessness and inhumanity and a brutal disdain for 
neutral rights unparalleled in history. Her 
frightfulness on sea has been of a piece with her 
atrocities on land. It helps us somewhat to be- 
lieve in a God of righteous vengeance — what the 
Greeks called Nemesis — ^^that this iniquitous black- 
guardism under the seas is proving progressively 
to have failed. The word of the hour from the 

79 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

masters of the ocean is that the submarine is be- 
ing slowly but surely conquered. Praise Him from 
whom all blessings flow ! 

I promised to speak, thirdly, of the probable 
conclusion of the struggle for sea power. That is 
the largest part of the subject, and the time at my 
command is growing short. Let me suggest, as I 
must on all these momentous topics, what I am 
unable to complete. The warfare on the sea and 
on the land is one, not two. That is perhaps the 
most basic general conclusion to be drawn from 
the principles worked out by Admiral Mahan. We 
are not fighting two wars, but only one, and so 
long as the sea is secure for us and for our asso- 
ciates, so long as the United States can transport 
reinforcements and supplies across the Atlantic, 
the land struggle cannot end favorably for our 
enemies. They may gain yet more devastated 
ground in France and Flanders. They may con- 
ceivably, though not now probably, push on by 
further human sacrifices to Paris and the channel 
ports. But two things they must accomplish be- 
yond that to win a German peace — ^that agreement 
with death and covenant with hell of which their 
Kaiser still boasts in the name of his German God. 
They must destroy the armies on the western 
front and — a very large contract indeed — they 
must gain supremacy over the open sea. So long 
as the control of the sea remains with us, neither 
of these aims can be accomplished. 

Admiral Jellicoe lately advised an English 
audience, in studying the progress of events, to 
use a large map. The larger the map we lise, the 

80 



THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER 

more encouraging is the outlook that we gain for 
the democratic peoples. On the scale of the world, 
Germany has already been defeated everywhere 
except on the Russian and the western fronts. The 
inaction of her main fleet is in itself an admission 
of defeat, all the more impressive because passive 
and silent. There is no reason for believing that 
Russia will remain always pliant under the iron 
heel of enforced military control. The signs of 
restlessness and growing revolt are patent. Dis- 
content in Austria is reaching the danger point. 
The lines on the western front are holding firm. 
The latest and most formidable of the German at- 
tacks was thrown back with terrific slaughter. 
Others will come, but they will be met. The sub- 
marine is effectively checked, if not yet entirely 
under control. The recent British exploit, of sink- 
ing cruisers loaded with concrete across the mouth 
of Zeebrugge Canal to prevent the exit and en- 
trance of submarines, was a feat worthy of the 
best naval traditions. Two aspects of the situa- 
tion remain to be discussed with reference to their 
bearing on the future peace and security of the 
world. 

One of these is the question of the disposition to 
be made of the German colonies. These lands, of 
great extent, but not of great immediate value, 
form together an area many times the size of 
Germany itself. If she had 'been able to secure 
what her military leaders have been calling a 
^^ strong' 'peace, based on the triumph of German 
arms, a proposal would have been made for an 
exchange of the occupied territory in Belgium, 

81 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

northern France and elsewhere, to secure the re- 
turn of these colonies, and douhtless further addi- 
tions to her over-seas possessions. It is inconceiv- 
able that the Allied victory, when it comes, can 
lead to any such outcome. German colonial enter- 
prise is apparently doomed, at least for the pres- 
ent generation. One possibility is that the chief 
among the victors, England, France and Italy, 
may divide up among themselves the colonies that 
formerly were under Grerman rule. Even this 
would be a gain. The Germans have been poor 
colonizers, not well adapted to the delicate task 
of governing subject peoples. Somehow the kind 
of rigid military discipline that prevails in Pots- 
dam does not succeed among the negroes of Africa. 
They do not obey orders quickly enough, and the 
only resource left to the Prussian mind is to shoot 
them down. But if the counsels of the United 
States, which has no selfish national interest to 
serve, shall prevail, as they well may, the former 
German colonies will probably be international- 
ized ; that is, placed under some form of general 
control, to secure their normal development on 
lines of progressive democratization. A policy 
may then be applied to them somewhat akin to ours 
in the Philippines. We are holding the islands, 
but only for the benefit of the Filipino people. 
That policy, if adopted, cannot fail of an ultimate 
strong reaction on the British policy in Egypt 
and India and on the French policy in Algeria and 
Morocco. It affords the best promise of making 
the world, in this aspect of it, safe for democracy. 

82 



THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER 

The other question is that of the future freedom 
of the seas, which includes the nature of their naval 
control. The seas are not going to be made free 
by sweeping all power from their surface. In 
some way, this also should be internationalized, 
though the problem is anything but easy. One 
condition of the coming peace should be the entire 
and unconditioned surrender of the German navy 
to the Allied powers; coupled with an absolute 
prohibition of further naval construction by Ger- 
many for a term of years, to be carefully fixed. 
That dangerous threat to the world's peace needs 
urgently to be disposed of at least for this genera- 
tion. The Kiel Canal 'and Heligoland should be 
ceded to Denmark. These drastic suggestions are, 
of course, open to criticism as involving an in- 
vasion of Germany's sovereignty. But she is a 
convicted criminal, at the bar of the world's jus- 
tice. She wanted this frightful war; she is hav- 
ing it. The outcome should be such as to remove 
from her any similar temptation for a long time 
to come. Drawing her teeth in a military sense 
appeals to me, at least, as far more just to the 
rank and file of her people than the economic boy- 
cott, now so widely favored. What conditions can 
be allowed to German over-seas commerce after 
the war must depend on. the spirit in which the 
German people accept peace. Their trade should 
not, in jay opinion, be selfishly boycotted after the 
immature and unwise plan of the Paris economic 
conference, but so regulated as to secure for the 
rest of the world the products in which Germany 
is foremost, for the restoring of her inner economic 

83 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

life by gradual degrees, and also to ensure fair 
and honorable competition in place of the govern- 
ment-controlled and centralized operations wliicb 
prevailed before the war. This is a thorny field 
for controversy, on which there musit be inevitably 
much debate around the peace-table and after- 
ward. But it will be debate by a war-chastened 
and sobered world, in which we may hope that 
essential justice will prevail. 

The control of sea power by the allied nations 
and ourselves will be complete, barring accident; 
which means that ithe future of the world will rest 
in our hands. However, this in itself cannot ab- 
solve us from grave difficulties growing out of the 
clashing of national and commercial interests. 
These always, in the nature of the case, tend to 
grow beyond the bounds of possible fulfillment. 
Everything depends on the spirit in which the re- 
sulting situation is met. Here again the sane and 
disinterested counsels of the United States should 
have great weight. We shall come out of the war 
with a navy of tremendous power and effective- 
ness. If we slash about carelessly with it, our 
future as a nation making for the peace of the 
world will be gravely imperilled. If we use it 
with wisdom and caution, it may be made the best 
bulwark of lasting peace. 

Britain and ourselves could easily hold control 
of the seas. But France, Italy, Japan, ultimately 
Russia, and one or more of the South American 
states, like Brazil and Argentina, will have to be 
considered. It is useless to hide from ourselves 
the evident fact that in this vast naval prepared- 

84 



THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER 

ness there lurk unknown possibilities of future 
conflict. If the spirit of an aggressive imperial- 
ism should come to dominate in any of these pow- 
ers, the peril would be imminent. The obstacles 
in the way of constituting a permanent and suc- 
cessful league of nations are very serious. But 
they must be met by the best and wisest states- 
manship the world can summon. The problems 
involved are to form the substance of the two fol- 
lowing sermons, with which this series will con- 
clude. 

Mr. Alfred Noyes, in his poem, ^'The Search- 
lights,^^ has voiced a warning that we, in common 
with the other warring peoples, will do well to 
heed. 

Shadow by shadow, stripped for fight, 
The lean black cruisers search the sea. 

Night-long their level shafts of light 
Revolve, and find no enemy. 

Only they know each leaping wave 

May hide the lightning, and their grave. 

And in the land they guard so well 

Is there no silent watch to keep? 
An age is dying, and the bell 

Rings midnight on a vaster deep. 
But over all its waves, once more. 
The search-lights move, from shore to shore. 

And captains that we thought were dead. 

And dreamers that we thought were dumb, 

And voices that we thought were fled. 
Arise and call us, and we come; 

And "search in thine own soul," they cry; 

"For there, too, lurks thine enemy." 

Search for the foe in thine own soul, 

The sloth, the intellectual pride; 
The trivial jest that veils the goal 

For which our fathers lived and died; 
The lawless dreams, the cynic Art, 
That rend thy nobler self apart. 

85 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

Not far, not far into the night, 

These level swords of light can pierce; 

Yet for her faith does England fight, 
Her faith in this our universe; 

Believing Truth and Justice draw 

From founts of everlasting law; 

Therefore a Power above the State, 

The unconquerable Power returns. 
The fire, the fire that made her great 

Once more upon her altar burns. 
Once more, redeemed and healed and whole, 
She moves to the Eternal Goal. * 

This striking poem is only one further illustra- 
tion of the great fact that everything material has 
its possible spiritual application, which the intui- 
tion of the poet finds. We of America no less than 
they of England need to take these words to heart. 
We have forever passed out of our provincialism. 
We are no longer safe in our former isolation. 
Our ship of state is launched and sailing on the 
broad seas of the world. We are io be searched 
by the same temptations and opportunities which 
have tried all earlier peoples, before which many 
have fallen and few have stood firm. It behooves 
us, in the days of grave testing that are before us, 
to look more 'than ever within and above for spir- 
itual strength. 

* From ''The Lord of Misrule and Other Poems," by Alfred Noyes, 
used by permission of the owners of the copyright, The Frederick A . 
Stokes Company, New York. 



86 



SERMON VI 

MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR 
DEMOCRACY 



And all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with 
the lifting up of their hands. — Nehemiah viii. 6. 



What all the people assent to, with the lifting up 
of their hands, and the repeated Amen, Amen, 
which means "^o be if — as the returned exiles 
of Judea assented to the laws of Moses read to 
them by the scribe Ezra — ^that is what we mean, in 
the sphere of government, by democracy. It is 
the rule, not by one, or by a few, but at least in 
theory and intention by all the people. In the 
course of our own national history, as the earliest 
and greatest of modern democracies, it has been 
given various typical definitions. Thus, by the 
Declaration of Independence, it is defined as gov- 
ernment wihich derives its just powders from the 
consent of the governed ; by Lincoln, in his Gettys- 
burg address, as government of the people, by the 
people, and for the people; by President Wilson 
and others, with special reference to the issues 
developed in the present world-conflict, as the 
self-determination of nationalities. The idea of 
democracy — ^whatever inherent difficulties may 

87 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

have to be overcome in reducing it to practice — is 
the idea that any group of human beings, larger 
or smaller, possessing enough unity and cohesion 
to exist as a separate nationality, should be al- 
lowed and encouraged to conduct its affairs, shape 
its institutions, and elect its rulers by means of the 
duly ascertained and lawfully expressed will of 
the entire body of its citizens. This is the demo- 
cratic idea, which was projected into the very 
forefront of the present struggle by the President, 
in his epochal message to Congress, on April 2, 
1917, when he urged the necessity of wax with 
Germany. He then uttered the famous sentence, 
that has been echoed since to the very ends of the 
earth, and has stirred mightily the waiting hearts 
of the oppressed and misgoverned of many races, 
**The world must be made safe for democracy.'' 

The declared and deliberate purpose of the 
United States, in embarking on the tragic but 
glorious adventure of war on the other side of the 
Atlantic, is to secure nothing short of that far- 
reaching consummation. We have set aside our 
tradition of isolation, and non-interference in the 
concerns of Europe, wholly for this — to make the 
world safe for democracy. Only after patient 
waiting — many of our people thought it too 
patient and long-enduring — for nearly three years, 
or until the sinister masters of Germany had fully 
unfolded their covert conspiracy against our- 
selves, as well as against all the other free and 
democratic peoples, did this nation throw its 
mighty weight into the scale on the side opposed 
to the menace of war-mad autocracy. It is well 

88 



A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY 

to bring again to mind the words in which Presi- 
dent Wilson convincingly stated the issue : 

"We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose be- 
cause we know that in such a government, following such 
methods, we can never have a ifriend; and that in the 
presence of its organized power, always lying in wait to 
accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be no 
assured security lor the democratic governments of the 
world. We are now albout to accept gauge of battle with 
this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend 
the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pre- 
tensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the 
facts with no veil of false pretence about the^m, to fight 
thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the libera- 
tion of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the 
rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men 
everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. 
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace 
must be planted upon the tested foundations of political 
liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no 
conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for our- 
selves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall 
freely make. We are but one of the champions of the 
rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those 
rights have ibeen made as secure as the faith and the free- 
dom of nations can make them." 

The war, then, means to us the acceptance of a 
challenge, whidh at last we became convinced we 
could not, and ought not to, decline. By instinct 
and organization this great democracy of ours, 
like every other worthy of the name, is unaggres- 
sive. Its mind is habitually concentrated on its 
own affairs. It turns to outside matters reluct- 
antly and only when these seem to threaten its 
inner well-being. By instinct and organization, 
on the other hand, autocracy is aggressive. It reg- 
ulates its internal affairs primarily with a view to 
bringing its united power into the service of a 
wider external dominion. The very existence of 

89 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

democratic goverinnents is felt by autocratic 
powers to be a menace to their, continuance. Un- 
less such governments can be weakened or over- 
thrown, they fear for their own safety. Likewise, 
democracy feels the permanent threat of any 
powerful and aggressive autocracy. Between the 
two, though peace may be kept for a time, there 
is in fact, just as between slavery and freedom in 
our own national history, an irrepressible conflict. 

The world cannot permanently endure half- 
autocratic and half-dem'ocratic. Some day, one 
part of it must battle with the other for the most 
elementary self-defense and self-perpetuation. 
This is the bare grain of truth that is contained 
in Germany ^s otherwise hypocritical contention 
that she is waging a war of self-defense. From 
the viewpoint of entrenched autocracy, the attack 
of the growing democracy was implicit and in- 
direct, but none the less actual. Autocracy could 
only be safe when it could feel itself to be supreme. 
This was the aim, now clearly disclosed, of Ger- 
many's half-century of fevered military prepared- 
ness on land and sea. Her rulers suspected and 
dreaded every advance of the democratic princi- 
ple, as an onslaught on their exclusive prerogative. 
That principle was fast making headway among 
the peoples of Europe; even, as we now know, 
beneath the surface in Russia. Against it, im- 
perial Germany stood at bay, much as our slave 
autocracy of the South stood at bay against every 
extension of the principle of free manhood, for 
example in the disputed territories of Kansas 
and Nebraska. 

90 



A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY 

Au'tocracy deliberately provoked the war, be- 
cause it tbought it saw its chance to win and to 
make the world safe for itself. Some time was 
required to bring the issue out, with absolute 
clarity. We of the United States needed to be 
sure that what was involved was something more 
than a mere readjustment of the balance of power 
in Europe, something m'ore than a mere dispute 
over colonial expansion. It had to be made plain 
to us that what was involved was, in the last analy- 
sis, the right to existence, the world over, of gov- 
ernment of, by and for the people, against the in- 
trigues and plottings of a power that claimed pre- 
eminence by divine and hereditary right. Then, 
when we really learned the truth, nothing was left 
for us to do but to take our stand with the other 
free and democratic peoples and highly resolve, 
under God, that the German and all kindred au- 
tocracy, as it had hitherto existed, should be made 
to perish from the earth. This must be done, if 
the world is to be made safe for democracy. 

The approaching military defeat of Germany, it 
ought to be well understood by us, though a very 
essential step in the fulfilment of our purpose, is 
still only the first step. It will then remain to 
secure a peace-settlement in accordance with our 
national ideals ; and, having made the world safe 
for democracy, to do all in our power to keep it so. 
Here a tangled web of problems rises before us, to 
which it is surely not too soon to give at least pre- 
liminary consideration. One set of these prob- 
lems is involved in the question of what we our- 
selves mean by democracy, and another is the fur- 

91 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

ther question, liow we propose to apply it to the 
world when peace has been finally declared. 

What, then, do we mean by democracy, and how 
far do we, or in the nature of the case can we, suc- 
ceed in realizing among ourselves the principle 
that we propose to extend to the rest of mankind! 
We are soon to be confronted by the most search- 
ing test that could possibly be applied to the in- 
stitutions of government in which we believe. 
Have they, in reality, all the virtue that we pro- 
fess them to have? Are they of such perfection, 
in actual concrete application, that we may have 
confidence in offering them, as the noblest possible 
gift, to the rest of humanity! ^^By their fruits 
ye shall know them,'' was the test proposed by 
Jesus. We are seeing some of the fruits of autoc- 
racy. Are those of democracy infallibly of such 
a kind that we can ask the rest of the world to fol- 
low our example rather than Germany's! 

The time is rapidly drawing near for us of the 
United States to engage in a more painstaking and 
serious self- scrutiny than we have ever yet given 
to our life and ways. It has been our habit to be 
somewhat over-confident. But the older world is 
not going to take us at our own valuation. We 
must ^^make good" in an emergency as severe as 
any to which any nation has ever been submitted. 
We need to take account of stock, and to look 
warily before we leap. I propose to engage with 
you in a period of self-exajmination — ^not in a spirit 
of flattery, but in one of the unflattering truth. 

When we have said that democracy means the 
rule of all the people, while that is formally ac- 

92 



A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY 

curate as a definition, it carries us a very short 
distance toward knowing what our form of gov- 
ernment is in its actual working. We assume that 
we are a democracy because we pretend to be 
one, but the truth is that the United States is not, 
and never has been, a pure democracy at all, but 
a federal republic, which is something altogether 
different. The only pure democracy we have ever 
had in this country was in the old New England 
town meeting, where all the legal voters got to- 
gether at least once a year and carried on the 
business of the town. Such a system becomes 
obviously impossi'ble in communities i)f more 
than a few hundred inhabitants, much more in 
cities of half a million, in states of ten million 
or in a nation of a hundred million people. Let 
us open our minds to the facts, and not permit 
ourselves to be misled by phrases. Undoubtedly 
we of the United States have much of the dem- 
ocratic spirit — more of it than any other people, 
unless it be the French, — but our system is one 
of representative government, based on general 
manhood suffrage, with a growing tendency to 
extend the ballot to women. 

The crucial question here is whether our gov- 
ernment is truly and adequately representative, 
or only seemingly so. Are we, as a rule, repre- 
sented in our city affairs, or in our state legis- 
latures, or in Congress, or in the higher executive 
offices of the state and nation, by the men who are 
best fitted to direct our affairs? It has long been 
notorious, with honorable exceptions, that we are 
not. When we compare the rank and file of our 

93 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

leaders in business and in the professions with the 
rank and file of our politicians we see the startling 
diiference. What if the great state of New York 
could be managed for a single year as the Stan- 
dard Oil Company or the American Red Cross is 
managed? We have just seen New York City, one 
-of the largest and most important public service 
corporations in the worid, turn out a mayor who, 
if little of a politician, was a most alble and skilful 
administrator of the people's trust, on modern and 
progressive lines, and put in his place a municipal 
judge, who may be personally honest and well- 
intentioned, but who is steadily lowering every de- 
partment of the municipal administration to its 
former level. We can call that neither democracy 
nor efficiency, but plain imbecility ! What can we 
say of the representation in Congress of even our 
great and powerful communities, like this manu- 
facturing and commercial city of half a million 
inhabitants ? Simply that the most representative 
men of such communities are practically never 
sent to Congress, and that for the most part our 
actual representatives are nonentities, of whom 
no one ever hears except at election time, or cares 
what he hears even then. American public life is 
a veritable paradise of more or less pretentious 
mediocrity. No man who can make a decent living 
at anything else will ordinarily soil his hands with 
it. This is admitted, except in war time, when we 
cover it with a thick coat of whitewash. Even the 
presidency, which is the office of the greatest 
potential influence in the entire world, has been 
more often occupied in our history by men of 

94 



A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY 

mediocre, than by men of distinguished ability. 
It is part of the extraordinary good fortune which 
has hitherto followed this nation that in times of 
real crisis, like the present, we have had Presi- 
dents, who were at least able to rise to the occa- 
sion. President Wilson has a cabinet of men who 
seem to be a:ble to learn, though slowly, by exper- 
ience. But how many great national leaders are 
there in the House or Senate? Precious few, so 
far as the country is aware.* 

While we are undertaking to make the world 
safe for democracy, it behooves us to do some- 
thing, as Governor McCall of Massachusetts has 
expressed it, to make democracy safe for the 
wor'ld. With us democracy is still an experiment, 
and by no means altogether an encouraging one. 
Just now, in the strain of war, we are on our good 
behavior. The government is able to command the 
volunteer services of the best type of men among 
us, men who in ordinary times are entirely ab- 
sorbed in their private business. To make my 
meaning clear, I need only ask you to compare the 
calibre of the men w'ho directed the last campaign 
for the Liberty Loan in this city to a successful 
conclusion with that of the men to whom we usu- 
ally entrust our city and county business. What 
is the explanation? It is partly that we are in the 
grip of the anachronism of the party system. We 
vote men into state or municipal office not because 
they have been trained or have shown any pre- 



*On these (points, the reader may consult with profit Bryce's 
"American Commonwealth," especially the chapters on "Why Great 
Men are not Chosen Presidents," "Why the Best Men do not go 
into Politics" and "The True Faults of American Democracy." 

95 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

vious fitness for the duties they are to be called 
upon to perform, Tbut because they belong to the 
party with which we agree in national issues. I 
grant you that parties are an essential feature of 
every working democracy. But we carry the par- 
tisan spirit into the minor spheres of government, 
where it is absolutely inapplicable. Nobody bene- 
fits by such a misapplication of it but the bosses 
and henchmen of the party machine. What has a 
man's opinion on the tariff to do with his fitness 
to be mayor of a city or governor of a state! Ab- 
solutely nothing; there is no possible connection 
between them. And yet most of our city and state 
officials are elected for their opinions on some 
such remote and unconnected questions. 

That is one ground of weakness in our working 
of the democratic experiment. Another, closely 
allied to it, is the lack of discrimination and fickle- 
ness on the part of our voters. Why is it that so 
few Americans of proved ability and self-respect 
will even present themselves as candidates for pub- 
lic office? Mainly because the average voter dis- 
trusts competence and expert ability, and prefers 
to elect some good fellow albout on his own level of 
intelligence and public spirit. Then if by chance a 
superior man is put into office, he can have no as- 
surance that his constituency will keep him there 
at the next election. Except for the professional 
politicians, public office with us is more often an 
interruption of a successful career than such a 
career in itself. How many of our abler men drop 
out of it after a time, even if the voters continue 
to sustain them, in order to secure for themselves 
and their families the more stable rewards of some 

96 



A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY 

private profession or business! I do not mean to 
affirm that we have no good men in public life, but 
that we have far too few of them and very much 
too many mediocre men. A comparison of the 
average in private, gainful occupations with that 
in the city, state and national service in normal 
times is not encouraging as a recommendation of 
our democratic system to imitation of the w^orld 
at large. As a people, we lack a genuine respect 
for the superior man. It is at least the merit of 
an autocracy that it does not subject him to the 
leveling envy of the average American voter. The 
Germans believe in and value the expert, and we 
see the result in their extraordinary advance in 
every department of human endeavor. 

. Another of our superstitions is that the only 
man fit to be elected to office is one who is already 
a resident in the community or district which he is 
called upon to serve. Does it follow that the man 
in America best fitted for the responsibilities of 
the head of a city government is necessarily some 
one already living within the limits of that city! 
The question answers itself. If a business house 
wants a manager it searches for the man best fitted 
for it from anywhere it can find him in the whole 
country. William Ewart Gladstone was enabled 
to continue for a lifetime to honor and exalt by his 
marvelous personality the Parliament of Great 
Britain only because he could be chosen to a seat 
from any part of the kingdom. Two or three 
times, when he was rejected by his own constit- 
uency, by a wise provision of the British constitu- 
tion he was elected from some other constituency 

97 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

in England or Scotland. One reason among 
others why we have had so few men of like em- 
inence in either house of Congress is becanse of 
the rule, utterly irrational, requiring previous 
residence of our Senators and Representatives in 
their electoral districts. 

A German custom which we may never choose to 
imitate, but which has some decided advantages, 
is the custom of weighing their votes, as well as 
counting them. Not only population, as with us, 
but property counts with them in deciding elec- 
tions. I know it is not a popular or democratic 
thing to say, nevertheless it is true more generally 
than is yet admitted in America, that property on 
the whole represents competence. The people who 
earn and save are apt to be the competent people. 
Those who get ahead are on the whole the ablest. 
The men of financial standing in any community 
are, in the main, its natural leaders. Of course it 
is not strictly true that money is equivalent to 
brains, but in our modern industrial and commer- 
cial society it is at least roughly so. One does not 
care to assert that the Prussian franchise, which 
is based on a property classification, is superior to 
ours; and, even if it were, there are other parts 
of the system that more than counterbalance. 
Germany is not a representative government at 
all. The Reichstag, which is elected by popular 
suffrage, has extremely limited powers. The real 
rulers are the hereditary princes of the several 
states, with the Kaiser-King of Prussia towering 
high above them all, responsible to no earthly 
power but himself. 



98 



1 



A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY 

Our votes are counted, not weighed. Because 
of our too g-enerous trust in human naiure, we 
place the power in control of mere numbers. 
That is equivalent to putting a premium on unin- 
telligence. It hands over the ultimate decision to 
the unleavened masses. The vote of the recent 
immigrant, or of the uneducated and usually un- 
thinking day-laborer, counts for as much as that 
of the most competent and thoughtful. As a faith 
this is magnificent, and when at length we get the 
people educated it will work ; but as a method for 
securing the best results from our present hetero- 
geneous population it is scarcely practical. I cer- 
tainly do not advocate a franchise based on prop- 
erty. But I do believe we should seek to develop 
a method by which the intelligent voter can hold 
his own against the mass of the unintelligent. 
Bow does our system work? We can perceive it 
most clearly in our city elections. The better third 
of the voters, those who have intelligence, public 
spirit and a desire for progress, are steadily out- 
voted by the other two-thirds. We make it in the 
interest of our public leaders to cater to the un- 
enlightened majority. The result is only too fa- 
miliar and depressing. We get good government, 
when we get it, by sheer luck. 

What is the moral of all that I have been saying 
about the seamy side of our democracy? Not, 
surely, that we are to abandon it and make our- 
selves over into a Grerman autocracy ! But that we 
are operating under what is, in many respects, an 
outgrown and antiquated system, well enough suit- 
ed to the nation in an earlier and more homo- 

99 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

geneons stage of its existence, but requiring a vig- 
orous overhauling in very many of its parts and 
processes, and a radical re-adaptation to the more 
complex conditions toward which we are swiftly 
evolving. The truth is, we Americans are masters 
in the realm of material mechanism. Our auto- 
mobiles, of the pattern of 1918, leave little to be 
desired. The same will doubtless be true of our 
airplanes, when we finally get them. But our 
system of government, of the model of 1783, is 
already far behind the needs of the times, and by 
force of a stagnant tradition — which we mistaken- 
ly suppose to stand for the only true Americanism 
— constantly tends to become more so. We are in 
desperate need of beginning to do some really 
fundamental thinking on the subject of our own 
democratic institutions. We are splendidly 
equipped with a genuinely democratic spirit, and 
in a time like the present that is able to go very 
far toward making up for the grave defects in 
the way that our public business is organized. But 
we cannot preserve this priceless spirit, as we need 
to do when the passing emergency is over, with- 
out remoulding our institutions to fit it. 

The worst defect of American, as of most other, 
democracy thus far is that it does not pick out 
and encourage and loyally sustain its true leaders. 
They lead as yet in private affairs, not in jDublic. 
Our private business organization and manage- 
ment is the best in the world. Our public business, 
if not the worst, is at least the worst among any 
people of our grade of general intelligence. All 
the people consent, indeed, but they say Amen for 



100 



A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY 

the most part to a kind of city, state and national 
government that falls far helow what they deserve, 
and onght to have. Now that we are proposing to 
give American democracy to the world, there can 
be no more urgent task before us as a great na- 
tion than to make it worthy of our undying faith 
in the democratic idea ! 

There is one thing that can be said of autocracy 
without fear of contradiction and that is that in 
many respects it is extremely efficient. This is 
where it most seriously reflects on democracy. 
Nor does it necessarily follow that autocracy gov- 
erns without the free consent of the governed. 
Most Americans dislike and disapprove of the 
German methods. But that is far from being the 
attitude of the Germans themselves. They dis- 
like and disapprove of our methods ! And the 
reason is not far to seek. For the German gov- 
ernment, while it is oppressive and tyrannical in 
some respects — a government of strict authority 
from above and not of free initiative from below 
— still exercises, except in time of war, a care over 
the common man and his family, his environment, 
his health, and his future in old age of which the 
democratic peoples are hardly yet at the begin- 
nings. In Germany, the science and art of gov- 
ernment ranks as one of the learned and honored 
professions. Men begin their preparation for it 
at the university, assured that it will afford them 
a profitable and satisfying career for a lifetime. 
While Germany has a party system, even more 
complex and disrupting than ours, this has little 
or no influence on the choice of the great majority 

101 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

of executive and administrative officials. These 
men are chosen for their competence, as shown hy 
examinations^, or by their record in some sub- 
ordinate post of service, rather than for their par- 
tisan opinions, which usually have no connection 
with the function they are to discharge in the body 
politic. Any fair comparison of German with 
American city administration leaves us so far be- 
hind that there is little room for national pride on 
this score. 

Of course, I am not advocating that German 
methods — even where they are of superior excel- 
lence — shall 'be suibstituted for our own. But it is 
urgent for us to realize that a condition, not a 
theory, confronts us. We cannot make the world 
safe for that spirit in peoples and in governments 
which we desire to prevail, by solemnly chanting 
in chorus that blessed word Democracy. Unless de- 
mocracy can meet autocracy, armed and equipped 
at every point, and in a fair field prevail, 
there is no hope for its future. The critical test of 
American democracy will not be in helping to win 
the war; but afterwards, in the world in whose 
gradual reconstruction, on lines of nationality and 
the self-determination of peoples, this nation is to 
be inevitably one of the most potent factors. Let 
us, then, ag never before, bethink ourselves as to 
what we say Amen to — both within our own wide 
borders and in that wider world which it is our 
declared purpose to make henceforth safe for the 
genuine and unfettered rule of, by and for the 
people. 



102 



SERMON VII 

AMERICA'S LEADERSHIP INTHE 
WORLD OF TOMORROW 



Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. 

— Matthew xxii, 39. 



I bring to a close today the consideration of 
tlie Vital Issues of the War, which has occupied 
us on the last six Sunday mornings. Let me begin 
this final sermon of the series with an expression 
of my appreciation of the generous tolerance and 
open-mindedness with which you have listened to 
my discussion of these current issues. It has been 
a time of great tension of mind and deep anxiety 
of heart. When the series opened, on April 7, the 
formidable Grerman offensive, launched on March 
21, was at its most dangerous stage. We have 
had the unspeakable relief of seeing it gradually 
checked and then firmly held. Meanwhile, we well 
understand that behind the German lines another 
mighty effort is being made ready. We must meet 
this further crisis, perhaps very soon, in any case 
before the summer is over. But the delay, for- 
tunately, has given time for the sending across the 
ocean of large bodies of American troops, who are 
now taking their places in the battle-line, as fast 

103 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

as their training will permit, beside their British, 
French, Belgian, Portuguese and Italian com- 
rades. Every week that passes finds ns and our 
associates stronger over there on the western 
front. This means that some who are dear to some 
of ns are exposed to imminent danger. Bnt we of 
America cannot fail to rise to the situation, as the 
people of all the Allied nations have so nobly risen 
to it. When, or if, the ultimate sacrifice of our 
dearest and our best is required of us in turn, we 
can only make it as the utmost of which we are 
capable for the great cause of securing freedom 
for the world of the future. 

It means much, I think, that in a time of such 
exceptional strain and stress you have been willing 
to listen to a free and frank discussion of some of 
the problems involved. I cannot assume that all 
of you have agreed with all that has here been 
said. The views which I have ventured to express 
are certainly not infallibly correct in every detail, 
nor have they been altogether consistent probably 
one with another. I have spoken, as in a place like 
this one ought to speak, according to my best 
knowledge and belief from week to week. The 
main thing, as I see it, is that these issues should 
be discussed — not only on the platform and by 
the press, but in the pulpit. Not all the pulpits of 
our land have discussed them as frankly as they 
have been handled here. It means everything, to 
me, that they should be brought to the test of those 
high sanctities and those eternal verities of which 
the church is the organized expression in human 
society. 



104 



AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP 

We have liad samples set before us of the pulpit 
utterances of German preachers on the war, as in 
the astounding volume, ^^ Hurrah and Hallelujah, '' 
compiled by Professor J. P. Bang of Copenhagen. 
One can only hope that such selections stand for 
the worst, and not for the best, that the church in 
Germany has found to say in these times of her 
spiritual blindness and devotion to the idols of 
material might. I trust that the sermons to which 
you have listened may at least have shone in your 
minds by contrast with the unspeakable pagan bar- 
barities that are reported from the pulpits of Ger- 
many. I have tried to be true to the spirit of this 
place, at a time when it has been especially hard 
for even the least pugnacious among us to heed 
the injunction to love our neighbor as ourself . 

The events of the past two months must have 
made clear to us, if we had not seen it before^ 
how critically, and we may even say how provi- 
dentially, important — especially for sustaining the 
spirit of invaded, glorious France — was the en- 
trance of the United States into the war on April 
6, 1917. At that time there was still no definite 
sign of the utter military collapse of Russia, which 
occurred later in the year. There has been much, 
and some of it justified, criticism of the delay in 
bringing our inexhaustible force into action. But 
the fact is, nevertheless, that the American people 
have responded with magnificent energy and 
unanimity. Food and fuel have been conserved 
and sent across the sea; ships are being launched 
and equipped in ever-increasing numbers. Our 
program of airplane construction, of whose vast- 

105 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

ness and intricate complexity few among ns have 
had any proper realization, is at last well under 
way. The help given by the American navy, in con- 
voying troops and supplies and in clearing the 
ocean of submarines, has been of a value hard to 
exaggerate. Now it appears that the vanguard of 
our army, not inferior in quality to any the world 
has yet seen, has reached the front in the very nick 
of time, and is being brigaded with the French and 
the British and thus made available in the best 
possible way. These are great results even for 
the United States to have achieved in the first year 
since we entered the war, and we may be confident 
that they are only a foretaste of indefinitely 
greater yet to come. 

When the war began and Belgium was invaded, 
it was all so new and unexpected to us that at first 
we were unable, any of us, to grasp its significance 
and to see how it might ultimately affect ourselves. 
The attitude of neutrality, counselled by the Presi- 
dent at the outset, as a matter of form — a counsel 
that any one of his predecessors would have given 
under similar circumstances — could not last long 
in fact. The first attacks by German submarines 
on American and other neutral ships began to open 
our eyes and to make the issue clear. When the 
Lusitania was torpedoed, some of us had no longer 
any doubt of the character of the nation that was 
running amuck among the peaceable peoples of 
the world. Still we had among us a great number 
of citizens of foreign, especially of German, 
origins and our national sympathies began to be 
deeply divided. A long-enduring distrust of Great 

106 



AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP 

Britain, bred in ns by the way in whicli our schoor 
histories have treated the War of the Revolution 
and the War of 1812, was still a potent influence, 
not to mention the Irish hatred of the English. 
But above all we were held back from the definite 
thought of participating in the war in Europe by 
Washington's historic advice to avoid entangling 
alliances, and by the influence of the Monroe Doc- 
trine, confining our interests to this western con- 
tinent. It is extremely easy now, looking back on 
the events of the past four years, to say that we 
should have acted otherwise than we did. But, as 
time goes on, and we come to see all that is in- 
volved, I believe we shall be more and more pro- 
foundly thankful for the leadership we have had. 
Few among us can have begun as yet to realize the 
vast and far-reaching significance for the future 
organization of the world, of our departure from 
our former traditions, and also the transcendent 
greatness of the statesmanship on the part of 
President Wilson that has made this departure 
possible in the united way in which it has been 
taken. It will be my purpose, in this closing ser- 
mon, to give these facts their appropriate setting. 

It was natural that there should have been im- 
patience with the President's long months of note- 
writing to the Imperial German Government, 
which seemed to be getting us nowhere. But, dur- 
ing all that period. President Wilson was perform- 
ing two simply invaluable services. At one and 
the same time, he was educating the alien and re- 
luctant element among our own people as to the 
issues that .were involved, taking them step by step 

107 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

along the way that his cautious but far-seeing 
mind was traveling just ahead of them; and with 
masterly skill he was building up the entire case 
against Germany, so solidly grounded in fact and 
so logically impregnable, that there can be no 
doubt that the verdict of history will justify our 
contention. After his series of notes had been writ- 
ten and followed up with the address to Congress, 
urging our declaration of war, there was nothing 
left to be said in Germany's defense. If Mr. Wil- 
son had been defeated for re-election, in the fall 
of 1916, before his policy was fully matured, he 
might have been thought by posterity to have been 
a failure ; just as Lincoln would have been looked 
upon as a relative failure if he had been defeated 
at the end of his first term, with the Rebellion still 
unsuppressed. When, finally, the case was com- 
plete, when Germany, violating her solemn 
pledges, resumed her unrestricted submarine cam- 
paign, the President disappointed his detractors — 
the honesty and patriotism of many of whom no 
one can question — ^by first breaking off diplomatic 
relations with Germany and then calling upon 
Congress to declare war. 

It is worth while quoting in this connection what 
Elihu Root, probably the ablest and weightiest of 
the President's partisan critics before he took his 
final stand, said of him after that stand was taken. 
Speaking at a war mass meeting in Chicago last 
September, Mr. Root said, having special refer- 
ence to the power vested in Congress by the Con- 
stitution to make war: 

108 



AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP 

"The power in this instance was exercised not suddenly 
or rashly, but advisedly after a long delay and discussion 
and patience under provocation, after repeated diplomatic 
warnings to Germany known to the whole country, after 
clear notice by breach of diplo,matic relations with Germany 
that the question was imminent, after long opportunity for 
reflection and discussion following that notice, and after a 
formal and deliberate presentation by the President to 
Congress of the reasons for action in an address which com- 
pelled the attention not of Congress alone but of all Ameri- 
cans and of all the world, and which must forever stand 
as one of the great state papers of modern times." 

In that same volume of Mr. Root's political ad- 
dresses, is one delivered during the campaign of 
Judge Hughes against Mr. Wilson for the Presi- 
dency, in which the speaker severely criticized the 
President's dilatoriness. It is part of the large- 
mindedness of a real statesman that Mr. Root was 
willing afterward to make this generous acknowl- 
edgment that I have quoted. 

When we recall the indecent haste of Austria's 
ultimatum to 'Serbia, allowing that poor little coun- 
try but forty-eight hours to reply to demands that 
came near to robbing her of her sovereignty ; when 
we recall the contempt for the sober judgment of 
mankind involved in Germany's sudden mobiliza- 
tion and despatching of her troops into Belgium 
and Luxemburg — there could hardly be a more 
striking contrast between the methods of autoc- 
racy and those of democracy in entering the war. 
The one showed itself to be secret, violent, giving 
the people no chance to express their deliberate 
will; the other, considerate, patient, waiting for 
the nation to form its mature and reasoned judg- 
ment on the issue and to approve the only course 
that remained open to us. What we lost by that 

109 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

policy in material advantage we have been given 
time to make up, while what we gained in moral 
advantage is beyond estimation. Of course Great 
Britain, France and Belgium had to decide on the 
instant; the threat to them was immediate. All 
honor to their heroic choice ; let them be paid their 
due tribute ! To us was given, by the fortunate 
circumstance of distance, the chance to show how 
a great people should decide on war when every 
other solution had been made impossible. 

America's leadership in the world of tomorrow 
begins by showing the kind of statesmanship, ap- 
pealing to conscience and reason, to justice and 
humanity, a democratic nation should have, and 
our nation has had in this unprecedented crisis. 
Who now is able to foresee all else that America's 
leadership will mean in the world of tomorrow? 
I can hope, in the closing words of this long dis- 
cussion, only to indicate a few directions in which 
even now it is apparent that our example will 
count. 

' One of the outstanding questions between de- 
mocracy and autocracy, as I indicated to you last 
Sunday, is that of efficiency. "We have been seeing 
how terribly efficient autocracy can become when 
armed with the weapons that modern science and 
industry can furnish. The real test, as between 
Germany and ourselves, will come only when the 
two armies confront each other on fairly equal 
terms. None of us need fear for the result. The 
only dread is that we may not be at the front in 
sufficient force when the trial comes. Even if her 
great preponderance of men enables Germany to 

110 



AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP 

gain some further advance, even if France and 
Britain cannot hold her where she now is, we are 
confident that the war can end in but one way. 
That means that autocracy will be discredited on 
its own ground, defeated with the weapons itself 
has chosen. The Germans have appealed to Caesar 
— to Caesar they shall go. All the reports that 
reach us emphasize the superior size, strength, 
intelligence and individual initiative of the Amer- 
ican troops. The conduct of our army will show 
a sceptical and scoffing world that long years of 
unprecedented prosperity have not spoiled us, 
that our democratic community is still sound to 
the core. There is not an autocracy in the world 
that will not be henceforth cowed by that display 
of righteous force made by the quickly assembled 
and hurriedly trained armies of the United States. 

Helping to win the war will be only the begin- 
ning of the service that America will have ren- 
dered. What of the splendid spirit shown by our 
democratic army, by our engineers and workers 
for reconstruction, by our agencies for human wel- 
fare? It is the simple truth to say that Europe 
has never seen anything like it. Of course in none 
of these ways are we serving alone. All honor to 
those who began long before we did, and bore the 
brunt of the earlier stage of the conflict ! But is 
it not evident that a new spirit of confidence and 
co-operation has come in since America really 
took hold? Let us not seem to forget the work of 
those earlier months for Belgium, by Mr. Hoover 
and his assistants, when America was still neutral, 
nbr the indispensable service rendered by the Red 

111 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

Cross everywhere. This coming week is to see 
the second drive since we entered the war for a 
fund of $100,000,000 for the work of the National 
Eed Cross in all the countries at war — for it is 
even feeding our prisoners in Germany. I need 
not in this place second that irresistible appeal to' 
your hearts. When were there ever such vast sums 
given by any people, and so lavishly, yet so wisely, 
spent for purely humanitarian purposes'? It is as 
unprecedented in all its dimensions as the great 
war itself. It is setting a new standard for the 
world of tomorrow. Never was an army so sur- 
rounded by friendly helpfulness, so guarded in its 
morals, which mean morale; never was an army so 
scientifically and skilfully mothered as our army 
in France and in the United States. 

We trust and pray that there may be no further 
wars like this one. But calamities cannot in the 
nature of things be avoided. We are learning now 
to meet them as they arise. Not only in artillery 
and aviation, not only in strategy and tactics, is 
the war bringing sudden and marvelous advances ; 
but also in medicine and surgery, in hospital care 
and nursing, in the rebuilding of broken homes and 
the restoring of maimed lives, is the present work- 
ing miracles undreamed of in even the recent past. 
No nation is more forward in this work of civiliza- 
tion, no other has greater resources for the needed 
task of reconstruction than our own. No doubt we 
are disposed to underestimate, from lack of 
knowledge, what the better mind and heart of Ger- 
many may be doing to meet similar needs. But 
we do know what a work of destruction and desD- 

112 



AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP 

lation has been perpetrated by the German hordes, 
and how the prisoners of war in Germany are be- 
ing mistreated. How the American spirit shines 
ont by comparison ! As the President said yester- 
day in New York, we are showing the world how 
a people can fight a war unselfishly. 

It has been even less customary in the past for 
nations than for individuals to follow the teaching, 
^^Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." His- 
tory may show that the United States of America 
has begun a new tradition in this respect. Our 
protection of the South American republics from 
European interference has not been without a self- 
regarding element. But it has not concealed any 
purpose to exploit them for ourselves. The latest 
and most outstanding instance has been President 
Wilson's policy in Mexico. It has not been with- 
out its minor inconsistencies, but what is its total 
effect ! Who is there now who will not admit that 
the policy of watchful waiting was far wiser than 
the more .aggressive policy, counselled by many 
who felt their material interests to be endangered, 
which would have made of Mexico an angry foe, 
menacing our flank? We have treated that coun- 
try as we would wish to have been treated our- 
selves by a greater power during our own early 
struggles. Mexico has a long way yet to go before 
she can attain to secure self-government. The 
temptation will be great to interfere for the sake 
of a more rapid development of her material re- 
sources. It may be that we can give help of this 
kind in the future, without being misunderstood. 
But the example of what a great neighbor nation 

]13 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

might be and do to another has been set and it is 
to be hoped it will be more widely followed in the 
future. Suppose that there had been an iota of 
this spirit in Austria's treatment of Serbia, or 
Germany's of Belgium! 

The United States has shown the same neigh- 
borly friendliness in China and Japan, and 
throughout these great powers of the Orient our 
purpose is understood, in spite of minor difficul- 
ties. It was through our agency in the first place 
that Japan opened her ports to western commerce 
and civilization. We have stood for the open door 
in China against the ambitious intrigues of Ger- 
many. Says a writer in the French Revue des 
Deux MondeSj '^ Since 1858, the government of the 
United States, far from wishing to commit an act 
of force or of violence toward the peoples and gov- 
ernments of the far East, has held to the attitude 
of being their protector and their friend. ' ' Refer- 
ring to the united front of China and Japan 
against Germany, the same writer continues : ^*0f 
this united front of the far East, the United States 
is the cornerstone and cement; without it this 
agreement would not have held good.'' That 
phase of America's leadership in the world of to- 
morrow, as affecting these mighty peoples of the 
Orient, holds almost infinite largeness of promise. 
China knows that through thick and thin that we 
are her friend, and so doea Japan. May it always 
be so. 

The President has declared his firm resolve to 
stand by Russia. We have not yet seen at its full 
value the wisdom of his action in refusing to sanc- 

114 



AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP 

tion the advance of Japan into Siberia. The Jap- 
anese are too different from the Russians to be 
trusted by them, besides which there are the still 
fresh memories of the recent war. It is inevitable 
that Russia should be suspicious of Japanese ag- 
gression. She has a long and difficult way before 
her in the adjustment of her internal affairs. She 
has not yet discovered her true leaders or her per- 
manent form of government. So far as possible, 
in this transition period, it is of the utmost im- 
portance that all her people should be made to 
feel that the United States is their loyal friend. 
For this reason the Root Commission, which went 
to Russia in the summer of 1917, cannot be con- 
sidered a failure. It was not seed wasted on stony 
ground, though the fruit may be long in maturing. 
No other people has sent representatives who 
could speak to the mind and heart of republican 
Russia as did those from this democratic republic. 
We must wait patiently for the results to manifest 
themselves. Meanwhile Germany, by her viola- 
tions of the Brest-Litovsk treaty and her aggres- 
sions against the Russia people and territory, is 
defeating her own purpose by sowing the seed 
of an undying hatred. Some day Russia will re- 
member what we said to her and stood ready to 
do for her in this darkest time before the dawn. 

Can we venture to say the same of Germany her- 
self? Deep and lasting as must be our righteous 
indignation at the enormities of the German con- 
duct of the war, I have tried in earlier sermons to 
show that she was not entirely without provoca- 
tion, from her point of view, in beginning it. While 

115 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

the other peoples have endured untold sufferings 
of her inflicting:, it has not been for Germany her- 
self quite the quick and easy success to which her 
leaders looked forward. She will come out of it 
needing friends as perhaps no nation ever needed 
them. When she finally comes to her right mind, 
she may realize that she has no better friend in 
the world than the United States. Then, I believe^ 
the significance of President Wilson's earlier 
policy, when he tried in vain to recall her to her 
better self, will begin to make its due impression. 
Some day, when the war-madness has cleared from 
their brains, the thinkers and historians of Ger- 
many will discover the way in which Mr. Wilson 
labored for many months to recall their leaders 
to the dictates of their higher nature. When that 
comes about, we may be able to act as a recon- 
ciling influence to bring this deeply-sinning people 
back into the brotherhood of nations. 

The war has brought about a new and closer 
unity of the English-speaking peoples. That is its 
great, outstanding result, so far as concerns our- 
selves. We shall never enter any imperial federa- 
tion of Great Britain and her self-governing de- 
pendencies. But it will be surprising if a moral 
unity has not been created which will be the most 
potent force making for world-peace in the future. 
Canada and the United States have been drawn 
into a closer mutual sympathy, born of sacrifices 
m'ade in common. The unfortified boundary of 
four thousand miles in extent between ourselves 
and our northern neighbors for over a century 
past, offers the happiest example of what will come 

116 



AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP 

to be in Europe, if militarism can be overthrown 
and the armed camp of the last half -century be 
transformed into a continent of peoples who shall 
strive with one 'another only on lines of honorable 
competition in the arts of civilization. 

That this may prove to be the war that ends war 
— that is the consummation of all its bloodshed and 
horror most devoutly to be wished ! The best and 
brightest hope of such a conclusion lies in the 
League of Nations, to which President Wilson 
pledged the support of the United States in. his 
great speech of May 27, 1916. He then said : 

"The nations of the world have become each other's neig-h- 
bor's. It is to their interest that they should understand 
each other. In order that they may understand each other, 
it is imperative that they should agree to co-operate in a 
common cause, and that they should so act that the guid- 
ing principle of that common cause shall be even-handed 
and impartial justice." 

In that spirit the American people are prepared 
to follow him until a more stable and dependable 
international order has been evolved out of the 
chaos of the older diplomacy which has brought 
us to where we now are. It is the spirit of un- 
selfishness, applied to the dealings of nations, the 
spirit of obedience to the commandment, '^Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.^' In that, 
America is already leading the way. This, with 
all it implies, is a new fact in the history of the 
world. Says Mr. Heiiry Noel Brailsford, in '^A 
LeagTie of Nations,'' which I have found to be one 
of the most fair-minded as well as the most pene- 
trating and judicious books that the war has yet 
inspired : 

117 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

"The new fact in the world's history is that for the first 
time a great power with a formidable navy, a population 
from which vast armies might be raised, and an economic 
and financial strength which might alone be decisive in any 
future conflict, is prepared to stake its own peace, not mere- 
ly to guarantee its own interests, nor to further the partisan 
aims of its allies, but to imake an end in the world of the 
possibility of prosperous aggression. Whatever may be its 
fate as a constructive proposal, this American offer makes 
an epoch in the world's moral evolution. Ambition and 
fear have masqueraded before now in an international dis- 
guise, but the disinterested advocacy of a cosmopolitan idea 
of duty has been left to academic moralists and Socialists. 
At length a Great Power, hitherto of all Powers the most 
isolated and self-centered, has adopted this idea as the per- 
manent foundation of its policy." 

The two policies — Germany's and our own — rtlie 
policy of national selfisliness and the policy of 
national unselfishness, have been set in motion, and 
we are seeing the results. Germany, an autocracy, 
tied to the old order of militarism, secret diplom- 
acy, and the exploitation of defenseless peoples, 
seeks to make her will prevail by armed might. 
America, a democracy, the pioneer of a new order 
banding the nations together to secure permanent 
peace, the democratic control of foreign relations, 
and the self-determination of nationalities, seeks 
to make the world a good neighborhood, in which 
justice and kindness shall be shown by all to all. 
We are only at the beginnings of this great en- 
deavor. The far, dim future will still be reaping 
its incalculable results ! 



118 



SERMON VIII 
THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 



So fight I, as not beating the air. 

— I Corinthians ix. 26. 



A generation ago, Thomas Hughes, the author 
of ''Tom Brown at Eugby" and other books for 
boys, gave wide currency to the phrase ''muscular 
Christianity." The Apostle Paul, in this text, 
shows himself to have been an exponent and up- 
holder of a Christianity of that resolved and 
strenuous type. In the original Grreek, it is clear 
that what he has in mind is fighting with the fists, 
after the manner of gladiators in the arena. He 
uses a word whose root is perpetuated in our 
word "pugilism." Like many another man with 
an eye for excellence in a region remote from his 
own leading interests, Paul was able to see some- 
thing admirable in the boxing contests of the Ro- 
man amphitheatre. When he himself fought, he 
wanted to hit something, as those sturdy fighters 
did, and to make his blows tell. There seems, in- 
deed, to be a profound instinct in all of us, when 
we fight, to want to do that; not to contend with 
shadows, and spend our strokes in vain. We have 
been forced into a fight of quite another kind ; and 
we need to take to ourselves the tonic of Paul's 

119 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

muscular Christianity, to see to it that our fight- 
ing smites the forces of evil that have arrayed 
themselves over against us, and does not waste 
itself in fruitlessly beating the air. 

Yes ! after nineteen centuries of what has called 
itself Christian civilization — and with what nearly 
incessant wars and rumors of wars has it not been 
attended! — now, in our turn, that we might not 
miss the severe testing to which every generation 
in all these centuries has had to submit, we are in 
a fight, a desperate fight; and it behooves us to 
acquit ourselves like men and be strong. The 
ruthless and determined adversary whom we con- 
front strikes to hurt, to maim, to destroy. He 
spares us no jot of his available force, equipped 
as it is with the completest science and organized 
and directed with the cunningest skill. His is no 
shadow-fighting, but actual to the last degree. To 
his terrible prowess a devastated and desolated 
Europe bears only too painful witness. The ruined 
towns of Belgium, the torn and bleeding fields of 
France, the wasted areas of Poland, Russia, Ser- 
bia, Roumania, Italy, the yawning graveyard of 
the open ocean — all tell the same incredible story. 
Our fighting, like that of the earliest muscular 
Christians, is not only against flesh and blood, but 
'^against principalities and powers, against the 
world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual 
hosts of wickedness in high places. '' We shall 
need all possible endurance and resolution if we 
are to win ; as, God willing, we must. Our gravest 
peril, now that victory draws nearer, is that we 
shall be over-confident. We need a degree of sober 

120 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

optimism, but we cannot yet indulge ourselves in 
a too-careless hopefulness. There is heavy, wear- 
ing work yet to be done. 

What are we fighting for? To hold out to the 
end, we on our part must be animated and welded 
together by a righteous purpose. Every indi- 
vidual member of this vast American democracy 
must be able to see for himself what is the 
national purpose, that we may strive on ^^ without 
stint or limit," as our President has said, until 
our purpose is accomplished. Otherwise it can- 
not be realized. This is a war of peoples, and we 
must wage it as a people, in conjunction with the 
other free peoples who stand with us for a better 
world-order, if it is not to be in vain. Because of 
the plausible peace-proposal advanced by the Im- 
perial Grovernment of Austria, doubtless with the 
knowledge and approval of its allies, the Imperial 
Governments of Germany, Bulgaria and Turkey, 
it seems to me timely to state the ultimate aims 
for which we are striving. 

Austria wants to initiate preliminary conversa- 
tions looking to a peace by mutual understanding. 
It is proposed that this be done after the fashion 
of the older diplomacy, now utterly discredited; 
the chosen representatives of the hostile govern- 
ments to confer together secretly, behind closed 
doors, in an endeavor to approach a common agree- 
ment. One wonders if this humble suppliant that 
now comes before us is the same proud and 
haughty Austria that in the summer of 1914 in- 
sisted upon its fatal forty-eight hour ultimatum 
to little Serbia ! The answer of the American Gov- 

121 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

eminent has been a conspicuonsly prompt and de- 
cisive No ; and behind that curt message, as voiced 
by Secretary Lansing in the name of President 
Wilson, the American people stand as a nnit. We 
ishall do well to assure ourselves of the grounds 
of that decision, as bearing on the whole vital and 
urgent question of peace in the future. 

To see the situation clearly as it is, we need to 
^0 back to the action of the Imperial Government 
of Germany in resuming, on February 1st, 1917, its 
unrestricted submarine campaign. This was the 
•direct occasion of the declaration of war by the 
TTnited States on April 6th of that same year. Be- 
-ginning with the sinking of the Lusitania, in May, 
1915, our government had written a long series of 
notes protesting against this inhumanity to neu- 
trals on the high seas. Finally the German Im- 
perial Government gave what was regarded by 
President Wilson and our people generally as a 
solemn pledge, expressed in the following terms : 

"In accordance with the general principles of visit and 
search, and destruction of merchant vessels recognized by 
international law, such vessels, both within and without the 
area declared as naval war zone, shall not be sunk, without 
warning and without saving human lives, unless these ships 
attempt to escape or offer resistance." 

We know how that pledge was kept. By its 
later notification of intention to resume its unre- 
stricted submarine warfare, the German Govern- 
ment deliberately broke its pledged word. It did 
so because at that time it believed in the subma- 
rine as a means to victory. But for us that was 
the last straw ; our fight for justice and humanity 
hegan then and there. 

122 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

Secretary Lansing, in Jnly, 1917, interpreted 
this decision of Germany as follows: 

"The immediate cause of our war with Germany — ^the 
breaking of her promises as to indiscriminate submarine 
warfare — has a far deeper meaning, a meaning which has 
been growing more evident as the war progresses, and which 
needed but this act of perfidy to bring it home to all think- 
ing Americans. * * * ♦ We know now that that gov- 
ernment is inspired with ambitions which menace human 
liberty; and that to gain its end, it does not hesitate to- 
break faith, to violate the most sacred rights, or to perpe- 
trate intolerable acts of inhumanity." 

A month later, replying to the peace note of the 
Pope, the Secretary of State, acting as mouth- 
piece for the President, said this: 

"We cannot take the word of the present rulers of Ger- 
many as a guarantee of anything that is to endure, unless 
explicitly supported by such conclusive evidence of the will 
and purpose of the German people themselves as the other 
peoples of the world would be justified in accepting. With- 
out such guarantees, treaties of settlement, agreements for 
disarmament, covenants to set up arbitration in the place 
of force, territorial adjustments, reconstitutions o,f small 
nations, if made with the German Government — no man, 
no nation, could now depend on. We must wait for some 
new evidence of the purposes of the great peoples of the 
central powers." 

There you have it ! Was ever the government 
of a great power so ronndly condemned at the bar 
of history! Evidence of the popular will in the 
enemy peoples, for which we are waiting, is still 
conspicuous by its absence. Kaiserism, militarism 
and autocracy continue in full control. Neither 
now, nor at any time in the future, can our gov- 
ernment hold any parley, secret or open, with the 
governments of Germany and Austria as they are 
now constituted. Between these iniquitous and 
self -condemned powers and ourselves it can be 
only war to the death. Either they must be put 

123 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

down or we must. The world will never be made 
safe for democracy so long as those sinister rul- 
ers, with their overleaping ambitions, their treach- 
erous methods, and their utter disregard for hu- 
man rights, continiie to exist. 

If our fighting is not to be a mere beating the 
air, if the sacrifices that we and the allied demo- 
cratic peoples have already made are not to be 
worse than water spilt in the sand, we must fight 
on, until those governments are destroyed, from 
without or from within. We must overturn and 
overturn and overturn, until no Hapsburgs or 
Hohenzollerns are left in power to curse and 
crucify mankind with their insane lust of conquest. 
These last four years have shown us to repletion 
what they are. Why repeat over again the cata- 
logue of their crimes, beginning with the spolia- 
tion of Belgium and not ending with the looting 
and burning of French and Flemish cities and 
homes as they retreat unwillingly toward their 
own frontiers'? The German armies have made 
a name for themselves, the stench of which will 
go up forever. But in the advance of the Allied 
and American forces they see at last their ap- 
proaching doom. In the increasing roar of the 
American artillery they begin, like Macbeth, to 
hear the fatal knocking at the door, and their 
guilty, bloodstained hearts already tremble. 

This Austrian peace note is their latest sharp 
trick, their clever, desperate bid for consideration. 
They want our diplomats to m^eet theirs, and play 
over again the wretched farce of dividing up Eu- 
rope, as it was last played by the Congress of 

124 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

Berlin in 1878, leaving a heritage of strife in its 
train, and finally this unspeakable slaughter as 
its direct consequence. Such another congress 
would only generate future wars. What Germany 
would still do if she had the power, we know too 
well from Bismarck's abject humiliation of France 
at Versailles in 1871; and even more certainly 
from the recent treaties of Brest-Litovsk and 
Bucharest, with distraught Russia and exhausted 
Roumania. When Germany can, she uses the mailed 
fist and only that; when she cannot, she puts it 
behind her back and trusts to honeyed words. Let 
us not consent to any such futile beating the 
air ! The old secret diplomacy of kings and courts, 
of armed camps and the balance of power, is in 
its death-throes. We are in this fight to secure a 
stable and enduring peace for mankind. 

Where should the victory lead us! This is the 
most critical problem for the world of tomorrow; 
and there is but one conclusion to which the en- 
tire course of our thought from the beginning un- 
erringly points. Military monarchy, able to utilize 
the whole gigantic force of a modern industrial 
state, directed to violent ends by a single heredi- 
tary will at the top, has long enough cumbered the 
earth. This war must see its final extinction. It 
has come to its last gasp, and the entrance of the 
United States into the conflict means that its fate 
is sealed. Emerson wrote, long ago : 

"God said, I am tired of kings." 

But we need to discriminate. The limited, pop- 
ular, democratic monarchs of Great Britain, Italy, 

125 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

Belgium, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, and 
even Spain are no longer kings in the feudal, ab- 
solute sense which has become such an anachro- 
nism in modern Germany. Though they wear the 
kingly trappings, these monarchs are scarcely 
more than presidents of their peoples, if as much 
as that. None of them wields a power comparable 
to that of our President today. If dethroned, 
they would scarcely be missed. Yet the modest, 
helpful King George of P^ngiand, and the heroic, 
knightly King Albert of Belgium, are the best ex- 
amples of what a constitutional monarch may be- 
come to his people. What a contrast between such 
kingship and the German Kaiser ! Those nations 
that have kings may keep them, if they like; but 
the real power has long since passed to the par- 
liaments, to the cabinets which they make and un- 
make, and to the organs of the popular will. The 
policy of these nations, domestic and foreign, rests 
on the broad base of the suffrages of their people. 
We have just seen the last of the Romanoffs, shot 
like a dog by the victims of his intolerable tyranny. 
We shall soon see the last of the HohenzoUerns 
and ITapsburgs, dethroned and fitly punished by 
a world that they have convulsed with horror. 

The first essential, then, to our moral victory 
by force of arms, is that monarchy in Germany 
and Austria, claiming to rule by divine right, shall 
be brought low. It has played out its game of 
universal murder with humanity as the stakes. 
The crying necessity of the present hour of fate- 
ful decision is that that game, played as we have 
seen, shall be hopelessly lost. This bloody adven- 

126 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

ture must be made demonstrably so colossal a 
failure that no king or kaiser of tlie older type 
shall be left to try it again. If the game could 
have been made to pay, these men would now be 
the rulers of the world. The primary purpose, to 
which we must devote our invincible strength, is 
to bring it to utter bankruptcy and ruin. The only 
conceivable alternative to kaiserism is to turn 
the world over to the divine right of its peoples. 
To that end, we fight on — not to destroy the Ger- 
manic nations, which is not possible — but to con- 
vert them by righteous force to democracy. When 
that conversion has come, and been witnessed to 
by works fit for repentance, then it will be time 
to proceed to gentler measures, that a world-alli- 
ance of democracy may secure the peace and pros- 
perity that feudal monarchy set itself to destroy. 

Once we are sure as to the end for which we 
fight, the consideration of the means by which it 
can be achieved must follow. Much has been said 
and printed about a league of nations, to which 
I cordially assent. But more and more it comes 
to me with the force of an overpowering conviction 
that, for the future salvation and blessing of all 
the European peoples — the German, Austrian and 
Bulgarian among the rest — there should be erect- 
ed, as the one positive gain and final, righteous 
solution of the war, an equal, equitable, federal 
union of the lesser and the larger continental 
nations — the United States of Europe! 

Up to the present time, this idea has not 
come prominently forward in current discussion. 
It is not a new conception, having been first f ormu- 

127 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

lated, so far as my knowledge goes, by the late 
Sir John R. Seeley, professor of history in Oxford 
University, in an article in Macmillan's Maga- 
zine for 1871. It was repeated by Dr. Edward 
Everett Hale in the Cosmopolitan Magazine, and 
elsewhere. Occasional references to it are to be 
found in contemporary writings, as in the war 
diary of Dr. Wilhelm Muehlon, former* director 
of the Krupp Works. However, it needs expan- 
sion and concrete application to the situation with 
which Europe will be confronted on the conclusion 
of an armistice, when practical form will have to 
be given to the terms of a lasting peace. In a 
sense it is a dream; but, as I shall undertake to 
show in conclusion, not a wholly Utopian one. 

The United States of Europe would be a federa- 
tion of the continental nations, and would not in- 
clude Great Britain. The British Islands, and 
the world-wide, democratic-imperial federation of 
which they are the head, offer another and dis- 
tinctive problem. Its solution is inseparably 
joined with the issues of sea-power, which have 
been touched upon in an earlier sermon. As 
Lieutenant-General Jan C. Smuts of South Africa 
has pointed out, in his distinguished volume of 
war-speeches, the federation of the British Em- 
pire, that he hopes may be realized in increasing 
measure, must be of another type from any con- 
tinental union, depending, as such a federation 
must, upon contiguity of territory in the states 
comprising it. That is not our question here, and 
it can be left for the wise statesmanship and the 
profoundly democratic instinct of the British peo- 

128 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

pies to settle for themselves. The line of cleavage 
runs through the English Channel. 

President Wilson has made it one of the basic 
principles of any peace to which he is willing to 
consent that it shall rest on the self-determination 
of nationalities. It is precisely the over-stressing 
of the principle of nationality on the part of Ger- 
many, but also on the part of her principal rivals 
for world-trade and colonization, that has brought 
us to this present pass. How the clashing of 
racial, territorial, commercial and colonial aspira- 
tions in the European states, greater and lesser, 
is to be obviated by any settlement made along 
present lines. is a difficulty of staggering propor- 
tions. The soundest argument for monarchy, 
especially in Germany, is that it is essential to 
the situation in which that nation finds itself, of 
continual peril from possible attack. Thus, Prof. 
Ernst Troeltsch, one of the sanest of German 
thinkers, writes : ''Only under monarchical leader- 
ship can the work of unity and development of a 
nation encompassed by danger.be accomplished." 
It is only too obvious how this bitter necessity 
lies at the very roots of the present struggle. 

Historically, in the growth and inner develop- 
ment of the broken fragments of the Roman Em- 
pire, we can see how inevitable was the rise of 
the modern European nationalities. But the pro- 
cess of evolution is not yet complete. The unifica- 
tion of Italy, and the imperial unity of Germany, 
achieved in the last two generations, were only 
steps to a farther goal. All Europe seems des- 
tined to be finally united, as Germany was united 

129 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

in 1870, and as one result of this war. The Balkan 
States, rent by fratricidar combat before they set 
the torch to the world-explosion, were fast pass- 
ing ont of the nebulous stage, but not yet welded 
into a distinct planet. Eussia, held together by 
the bond of absolutism, seems now threatening to 
break up into a collection of smaller nations. As 
to that, it would be premature to prophesy. But 
what seems to me to cry aloud — above even the 
harsh voices of chaos that now prevail — is a de- 
mand for the federation of that blood-soaked and 
war-weary continent. Still, in spite of all, it re- 
mains the home of much, indeed of most, of the 
fairest promise for the world's ultimate salvation. 
What a scene, what an arena, of mingling beasts 
and men, it has been, and is ! The highest and the 
basest of human possibilities grow and struggle 
together in that old Europe, with its cathedrals, 
its treasures of art and literature, its birthplaces 
of the world's greatest men and women, with few, 
very few, exceptions; all these, and then this war! 

In its economic life, the foundation of all its 
other life, Europe has long been increasingly one. 
From this basic standpoint, the existing bound- 
aries between its peoples are either imaginary or 
purely artificial — tariff walls of mutual exclusion 
and mutual damage. In its racial and social con- 
ditions, notwithstanding the conflicting ambitions 
and animosities which have led to the present 
crisis, the continent is substantially one. It con- 
tains no single considerable element, on the whole 
so backward, unrelated and difficult of complete 
assimilation as our millions of the Negro race. 

130 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

The Turks are tlie only intractable factor in the 
problem, bnt they can be pushed over into Asia 
and left there to be dealt with at a later stage of 
the world's evolution. In its civilization, in spite 
of the overweening pretensions made in behalf of 
German Kultur, I venture to claim that Europe 
is also one. The great tasks of civilization, in the 
very nature of the case, are something to be shared 
in common — no people can claim or keep a mo- 
nopoly of them. When the Germans have been 
disillusioned of their philosophy of militarism, 
and give themselves again to peaceful science and 
commerce; when once they learn to take the ad- 
vice of the much-abused Nietzsche and become 
"good Europeans," then they will be as welcome 
everywhere as they were before the war began. 
Only let them throw off, with autocracy, their 
autocratic manners, and become good democrats, 
with the rest of us. 

The most rooted national differences are those 
between France and Germany. But let it once 
be clearly understood that these differences are 
mainly not racial but political, and let federation 
do its perfect work of reducing them, and they 
would be no more troublesome than the similar 
differences between some of the American colonies 
before the adoption of the Constitution, which 
nearly led to war and in one or two cases quite 
did so. Alsace-Lorraine, even, could without great 
difficulty have been reconciled to its return within 
the bosom of the German Empire— from which 
it was split off originally by Louis XIV— if only 
a modicum of political tact could have been em- 

131 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

ployed in dealing with its people following the 
conquest. In a federated Europe, it would make 
no great difference whether Alsace-Lorraine be- 
longed to Germany, or to France, or was made an 
independent state. That men of more than half 
German blood can become patriotic Frenchmen, 
is shown by the long list of Alsatian and Lor- 
rainian names high on France's roll of honor, 
from Napoleon's time until now. This war has 
been a civil war, the slaughter of European brother 
by European brother, like our similar strife of 
1861-1865 ; and with the right spirit and method 
the continent can become in fifty years as firmly 
knit together around one common hearth as are 
our North and South today. It may seem incredi- 
ble now. But so did our division seem irreparable 
in the days of carpet-bag governments and the 
waving of the bloody shirt which some of us can 
so clearly remember. The miracle was accom- 
plished once by the healing hand of time, and it 
can be accomplished again. Only get rid of the 
kaisers and autocrats ; only give the rule to all 
the people — not to one class, as in Bolshevik Eus- 
sia — and federation will follow almost of itself. 

It alone, in my sober judgment, will solve the 
problem of the self-determination of nationalities. 
For one thing, a nationality is not a geographical 
unit. Eacial elements do not stay put, as static 
quantities. They spread, with a dynamic life, or 
they contract, for want of it. Poland, for example, 
can never be a geographical unit while the Poles 
continue to spread out in every direction as they 
have so long done. The untangling of the nation- 

132 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

alities in the Balkans, so tliat each may rule over 
itself, is a task of impossible intricacy, to which 
the genius even of President Wilson is not equal. 
Leave Europe substantially as it is, divided be- 
tween larger and smaller separate nationalities, 
each with its attractions and repulsions, its de- 
sires and ambitions, and in spite of any conceiva- 
ble league of nations the repetition of this war 
within a given time is a mathematical certainty. 
Difficult as federation may be — and it is impossi- 
ble here to work it out in detail — it offers to my 
thinking the one reasonable and hopeful solution. 
Let that be the most urgent concern of those who 
gather about the peace-table. 

Already in these sermons, I have more than 
once insisted that it will be a sadder, wiser, in- 
finitely humbler Germany — a G-ermany perhaps 
plunged through revolution after her signal and 
undeniable defeat — a Germany with kaiserism and 
autocracy and militarism only a horrible night- 
mare of the past, that we shall see when the strug- 
gle is over. Only such a renovated Germany, in 
spirit and in institutions, could be asked to enter 
the United States of Europe. When such a Ger- 
many rises slowly on the ruins of the old, it will 
be for us who have been her consistent enemies to 
turn to a more fruitful friendship. Then the great 
place in the world that she has aspired to hold 
may in time become hers; not as lording it over 
the earth, but as a leading member of one of the 
greatest political unions the world has yet seen. 

To bring this consummation to pass remains 
the herculean task awaiting the competent states- 

133 



THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR 

manship of the world, including our own. What 
we have enjoyed on this American continent for 
more than a century and a quarter, as the bul- 
wark of our liberties and the basis of our internal 
quiet, it should be our fondest hope to pass on to 
Europe. Not to work toward it, as a part of our 
contribution to ending the war, would be a shame 
and a sin ; even if it takes another half-century of 
adjustment and negotiation. No one who has any 
just comprehension of the national and racial dif- 
ferences, prejudices and mutual suspicions engen- 
dered by the existing European state-system can 
minimize the obstacles that such an endeavor must 
confront and overcome. But this is one of those 
rare moments in history which, as Bismarck de- 
clared, never return. We must utilize it to the 
utmost. Then the millions upon millions of the 
world's best youth, not forgetting our own sacred 
dead — whose green and peaceful graves in foreign 
soil will be hereafter the shrines of innumerable 
pilgrims from the new world to the old — these will 
not have died in vain ! Their fairest and longest 
enduring monument will be the future United 
States of Europe ; and that great federation, when 
it comes, will be, with our own American Union 
and the British Empire, the unshakeable pillars of 
a thousand years of peace for humanity! 



134 



LIBRARY OF CONRRPce 

018 465 314 A^# 






■(••iii.'.SHij 









'^(:v:::^^■'■Vvv;:t•^^:i 



;^i ■':■ 



; 'I 

■• .i 

i 



:.■...]. 






'''::]''• f%iO''^-^,Sk 



■,;:.,: ..fv,, 



.;•!;•'•■. J ■•;' 



.f. ..'. 



Ili^^ 



« 









'^^^^v.:;-.:^;:;:;: 












